title: Empathy in children with autism and conduct disorder: group-specific profiles and developmental aspects.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  A deficit in empathy is discussed to underlie difficulties in social interaction of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and conduct disorder (CD). To date, no study has compared children with ASD and different subtypes of CD to describe disorder-specific empathy profiles in clinical samples. Furthermore, little is known about age influences on the development of empathic skills. The aim of the current study was to compare cognitive and emotional empathy in different age groups of children with ASD, CD with elevated or low callous-unemotional-traits (CU+ vs. CU-) and a matched control group (CG).
  
  
  METHODS
  Fifty-five boys with ASD, 36 boys with CD-CU+, 34 boys with CD-CU- and 67 controls were included. The study implemented three tasks on emotion recognition, perspective taking and emotional affection induced by another person's situation. Multivariate Analysis of variance with the factors group and age (median split) including their interaction term was performed to describe disorder-specific profiles.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Empathy profiles showed differential impairment in children with ASD and CD-CU+. Boys with ASD were impaired in cognitive empathy while participants with CD-CU+ were impaired in emotional empathy. Children with CD-CU- did not differ from the CG. However, boys with CD-CU- were less emotionally reactive in response to film stimuli than children with ASD. Furthermore, we found strong age effects indicating an increase in cognitive and affective empathic skills beyond early infancy in all groups.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In this study, distinct empathic profiles in children with ASD and CD-CU+ were found. Furthermore, the work demonstrates improvement of empathic skills throughout childhood and adolescence, which is comparable for individuals with psychiatric disorders and control children. These results yield implications for further research as well as for therapeutic interventions.
authors: Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University Frankfurt/M., Deutschordenstraße 50, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. christina.schwenck@kgu.de
authors: Christina
authors: C
authors: Schwenck
authors: Julia
authors: J
authors: Mergenthaler
authors: Katharina
authors: K
authors: Keller
authors: Julie
authors: J
authors: Zech
authors: Sarah
authors: S
authors: Salehi
authors: Regina
authors: R
authors: Taurines
authors: Marcel
authors: M
authors: Romanos
authors: Martin
authors: M
authors: Schecklmann
authors: Wolfgang
authors: W
authors: Schneider
authors: Andreas
authors: A
authors: Warnke
authors: Christine M
authors: CM
authors: Freitag
mesh_terms: D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D019955:Conduct Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D004645:Empathy; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015999:Multivariate Analysis