Posted by Donna Hobgood on February 17, 2012, 4:23 pm, in reply to "Extreme Male Brain Model"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21744731
Autism and "extreme male brain" seems real from many lines of evidence.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21901838
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22122342
From some of the other reading we have done on genes and personality, it appears that empathy has not been drilled down on in great detail in this literature. But, empathy does seem, in the psychological literature, to be lacking in anti-social disorder. Antisocial disorder has been linked to several genes (especially, or exclusively) when environment is unfavorable. But empathy seems more likely in personalities that could be described as more sensitive, and the genes which are often found to be associated with more sensitivity to environment (and other people) include the genes 5HTT s (a putative Perfectionism gene), DRD4 7R (a putative non-Perfectionism gene), DRD2 taq 1A1, a putative gene in LD with deficit in Narcissism, DRD3 ser, a candidate gene for Aggression trait, MAOA long form promotor (a candidate gene for non-Aggressiveness), and COMT, low activity (a candidate gene for Submissiveness and for Perfectionism). So it looks like that NPA type N may have less empathy than some other types, but other than that preliminary conclusion, we don't know very much about empathy and NPA traits.
I think we can all agree empirically that although we use the concept "extreme male brain" for the autism-type syndromes because of some studies showing higher testosterone and other male features in autism, following some psychometric findings where there is less attention to interpersonal than to mechanical data in males in general, empathy is not less common in males than in females.
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