This is according to a report by psychologist Carolien Rieffe and colleagues from the Autism Centre and INTER-PSY (Groningen).
Information about autism in girls is scarce
According to Rieffe, what we know about autism is mainly based on research among boys and men.
“If we take the clinical picture for boys with autism as the standard, there's a good chance that autism in girls won't be picked up,” says the Leiden Professor of Development Psychology.
To change this, Rieffe and her colleagues examined how autism manifests itself in girls.
How autism manifests itself in girls
The researchers analysed the behaviour of 68 teenagers, girls and boys, both with and without autism.
As part of the test, the researcher pretended to have caught her finger in the ring binder of a file, and exclaimed: 'Ow, that hurt,' while shaking her hand in pain.
Two fellow researchers looked at the video afterwards to assess how empathically the participants had reacted.
Girls react with more empathy
Girls, whether or not they suffer from autism, reacted with more empathy than boys.
“We didn't find any differences between the participants with or without autism. But we did see a qualitative difference between girls and boys. The girls more often responded to the emotion of the person conducting the test with questions such as: 'Are you OK?' The boys, on the other hand, looked for a solution to the problem: 'If you do it like this, you won't trap your finger,” explains Riefe.
Inability to understand other people feelings
Rieffe adds that neither boys nor girls have difficulty empathising with the emotions of another person. However, the ability to understand why the person feels as they do is often lacking in both girls and boys with autism.
This is why it is more difficult for young autism sufferers to react with empathy to such situations as love problems or conflict situations, all of which are topics that young people spend a lot of their time talking about.
