A new task (‘CARER’) was used to test claims of reduced empathy in autistic adults. CARER measures emotion identification (ability to identify another’s affective state), affective empathy (degree to which another’s affective state causes a matching state in the Empathiser) and affect sharing (degree to which the Empathiser’s state matches the state they attribute to another). After controlling for alexithymia, autistic individuals showed intact affect sharing, emotion identification and affective empathy. Results suggested reduced retrospective socio-emotional processing, likely due to a failure to infer neurotypical mental states. Thus, autism may be associated with difficulties inferring another’s affective state retrospectively, but not with sharing that state. Therefore, when appropriate measures are used, autistic individuals do not show a lack of empathy.

一个新的任务（“ CARER”）用于测试自闭症成年人共情减少的说法。CARER测量情绪识别（识别他人情感状态的能力），情感共情（他人情感状态导致移情者中匹配状态的程度）和影响分享（移情人状态与他们归因于他人的状态相匹配的程度）。在控制了阅读障碍之后，自闭症患者表现出完整的情感共享，情感识别和情感移情。结果表明，回顾性的社会情感处理减少了，这可能是由于未能推断出神经型精神状态所致。因此，自闭症可能与回顾性地推断他人的情感状态有关，而与共享该状态无关。因此，当采取适当措施时，