Autism Could Be Linked To ‘Hyper-Empathy,’ Says Lecturer

To be frank, I was always surprised to read that some people associated autism with a “lack of empathy” or “empathy dysfunction”.

I know autism is a broad spectrum, meaning a “rule” that applies to one person doesn’t necessarily show up in another. But I’d noticed some loved ones with autism seemed to experience more empathy (or at least a more intense empathy) than average, not less.

In 2024, researchers found a high percentage of “hyper-empathy” among autistic people.

Here, we spoke to one of the study’s authors, Dr Stephen Connolly, a Senior Lecturer in Autism from the Sheffield Hallam Institute of Education, about his team’s findings.

Hyper-empathy is “an intense emotional response to people, plants, objects, animals, even fictional characters, often to the point of distress. It is intense, all-consuming thoughts and feelings that can make it hard for someone to distinguish their own feelings from another person’s.”

Sometimes, Dr Connolly said, this overwhelming hyper-empathy can be so intense that it can lead to vomiting, nausea, pain, agitation, crying, depression, anxiety, and burnout.

A person with hyper-empathy might even lose money over it. This can happen when “someone wants to pay to try resolve the problem such as taking in an animal from a shelter, paying for someone’s shopping, [or] replacing an item someone has lost or broken”.

And the trait could even cause issues in relationships, as people’s friends and family may wonder why “someone is seen as putting emotional resources into a damaged piece of furniture, an injured bird, or a homeless person but not their partner or friend… Some people can blame the hyper-empathic person for their responses, leading to breakdowns in relationships.”

Dr Connolly added that people with hyper-empathy might avoid situations that elicit this often extremely intense response.

Therefore, they might not “be willing to enter some environments or be there for people when they are needed.

“There is an immense emotional, cognitive and physical load attached to a hyper-empathic response that can be all-consuming. At best it can halt a person’s day, at worst it can lead to suicidal ideation.”

Dr Connolly’s research is not the only study to link autistic people with a greater likelihood of experiencing hyper-empathy.

“Early and growing research is suggesting it can be a fairly common response in autistic people, but understanding it can be difficult,” the lecturer told us.

“One of the challenges is that some people have talked about how they felt empathy so much they had to ‘shut it off,’” meaning that while their baseline levels of empathy might be very high, they could have adapted to hide it.

Meanwhile, many autistic people may have alexithymia, or difficulty naming, identifying, and/or expressing their own feelings.

“There is also a well-researched issue of the double empathy problem, where someone’s empathic response is not validated or accepted as empathy and so goes unacknowledged by those around the person,” Connolly continued.

This can happen when two people have very different experiences of the world.

“All this can lead to the person [being] seen as not having empathy.”

Of course, hyper-empathy is not a universal autistic trait. In his 2024 research, Connolly and his team found a “huge amount of variation in the empathic experiences of participants”; some identified with having lower empathy, while others described very powerful empathetic reactions.

The expert told us that hyper-empathy is “substantially” underplayed and ignored in discussions about autistic people, partly due to “historic misunderstandings”.

For instance, he said, early autism research from people like Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger suggested that people with autism seemed to have less emotional reactivity in empathetic scenarios.

Experts like Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, a student of Uta Firth who created the first UK clinic for adults seeking a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome in 1999, may have been influenced by their ideas, Connolly claimed.

(Asperger’s is no longer a diagnostic term; it’s now seen as part of the autism spectrum).

Baron-Cohen has since expressed regret over characterising autism using an “extreme male brain” theory, telling The Guardian: “Some of those terms were very easily misunderstood… It can lead to simplistic headlines like ‘autistic people lack empathy’, which is not true”.

However, he said that the underlying science still stands, calling the idea that autistic people lack empathy a “myth”.

Dr Connolly said that later, researchers Dr Luke Beardon and, separately, Dr Damian Milton suggested that major studies might have missed empathy in autistic people because they were only looking for the kind typically expressed by those without autism.

But the problem is that many of the ideas that influenced popular thought about autism were set in the ’80s and ’90s, overtaking newer ideas, he added. They may have even been “central to the development of understanding of autism in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the standard diagnostic tool used by mental health experts in the US].”

So, Connolly said, potentially outdated tropes were “reproduced in media (e.g., Rain Man, The Big Bang Theory) and spread the message that autistic people lack empathy. It is even a core element of the diagnostic process still in 2026”.

Therefore, “When [autistic] people express hyper-empathy, it [can] go unacknowledged, and often the impact (burnout, physical, and other costs) will be attributed to something else… people can also be seen as challenging because of their hyper-empathic responses,” he ended.

“We have a significant number of autistic people who society deems to lack empathy but experience intense emotional responses that can lead to psychological, physical, social, and economic impact[s], and this will all go unsupported, or even [be] seen as challenging, or a problem leading to potential long-term impacts.”