Autism spectrum disorder and psychopathy: shared cognitive underpinnings or double hit?

Abstract

Callous/psychopathic acts in a small number of individuals with ASD probably reflect a 'double hit' involving an additional impairment of empathic response to distress cues, which is not part and parcel of ASD itself.

Understanding offenders with autism-spectrum disorders: what can forensic services do?

“…affective features including a lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callousness/lack of empathy and a failure to accept responsibility for own actions (Murphy 2007). Some independence of autism-spectrum disorder and psychopathy was also found among adolescent boys (Rogers 2006), but with the idea of a 'double hit' for those who displayed an impairment of empathic responses to distress cues.…”

Continuity of aggressive antisocial behavior from childhood to adulthood: The question of phenotype definition

“…Inter-hemispheric transfer is targeted in research on brain processes relevant for autism (Nydén, Carlsson, Carlsson & Gillberg, 2004). Details of these parallels are, however, insufficiently known (Rogers, Viding, Blair, Frith & Happé, 2006), and clinical experience describe autistic social difficulties as qualitatively distinct.…”

Processing of Emotion Words by Patients with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from Reaction Times and EEG

“…There is a possibility that other parameters, which we did not measure, such as callous-unemotional traits (Dolan and Fullam 2010;Rogers et al 2006) or alexithymia (Bird et al 2010(Bird et al , 2011Lombardo et al 2007), are responsible for differences between our sample and samples included in the other studies.…”