Autism discourse

In response to the article about the lack of evidence for a link between testosterone and empathy (October, p15), I’d like to point out that “the capacity to read the emotions of others” being impaired doesn’t mean such a person doesn’t have empathy, any more than someone who is ‘face blind’ doesn’t have a face.

Martin Petryszyn, via email

I enjoyed reading your article about testosterone and empathy in autism. However, when talking about the sex differences in autism, you didn’t mention that research also suggests that the reason for fewer girls being diagnosed than boys may be instead due to flaws in the diagnostic process. Research has suggested that girls may find it easier to mask or compensate for autistic traits than boys, and that differences in early social experiences may also play a part.

I’d also like to add that studies have a tendency to treat autism as a single disease – yet in reality it’s a spectrum. A high-functioning autistic person and a person with severe difficulties communicating, perhaps to the point of not being able to speak, may not have quite as much in common as the single diagnosis might suggest. Tamsin Nicholson, via email

Thanks for writing in. I suspect what the study and article haven’t got across well (due to their brevity) is that cognitive empathy is intertwined with what’s sometimes called ‘mind-reading’ or ‘theory of mind’. This is an individual’s ability to put themselves in another person’s position. Not just in an emotional sense, but in a physical one too. Many people with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis struggle to imagine themselves seeing objects from different perspectives and this core difference, among others, underlines a lot of the difficulties people with ASD face. Having worked with children with ASD, I can confirm they definitely have emotions! And yes, the single diagnosis does disguise the variety, but searching for what unifies people in this spectrum will help us understand what’s happening in the brain, and ultimately how to make the world better for people with ASD. There’s still a massive amount we simply don’t know about the condition. Daniel Bennett, editor