An Expert Discussion on Autism and Empathy

Autism in Adulthood strives to be a home for constructive interprofessional dialogue on pressing issues that affect the lives of autistic adults. We do this in a number of ways. One is to hold roundtable discussions with experts in the field. Our first roundtable discussion concerns the topic of autism and empathy, a hotly debated construct within and outside academia.1 As early as 1962, psychologists described children with “autistic psychopathy” as being “unable to achieve empathy.”2 An empathy deficit has since become a core feature in many conceptualizations of autism, including the theory of mind (or mind-blindness) model and the empathizing-systematizing model.3 Researchers have distinguished between cognitive empathy (or theory of mind; the capacity to understand another person's perspective or mental state) and emotional or affective empathy (the capacity to experience affective reactions to the observed experiences of others), asserting that autistic individuals have deficits in the former, but not in the latter.4,5 Even this position, however, has been widely criticized by autistic individuals in online forums. For example, purported deficits in cognitive empathy may be a problem of experiencing too much emotional empathy or of needing more time to process empathy's cognitive aspects.6 Or they may be due to a breakdown in mutual understanding between people who experience the world differently (and may apply just as much to neurotypical people failing to empathize with autistic people as it does in the opposite direction).7 Autistic adults often argue that the notion that autistic individuals lack empathy or theory of mind is dehumanizing and perpetuates dangerous stereotypes and oversimplifications.6 Following is a transcript of our roundtable discussion, with minor edits for clarity

4D Numerical Analysis of Scaffolds: A New Approach

A large range of biodegradable polymers are used to produce scaffoldsfor tissue engineering, which temporarily replace the biomechanical functions ofa biologic tissue while it progressively regenerates its capacities. However, the mechanicalbehavior of biodegradable materials during its degradation, which is an importantaspect of the scaffold design, is still an unexplored subject. For a biodegradablescaffold, performance will decrease along its degradation, ideally in accordanceto the regeneration of the biologic tissue, avoiding the stress shielding effect or thepremature rupture. In this chapter, a new numerical approach to predict the mechanicalbehavior of complex 3D scaffolds during degradation time (the 4th dimension)is presented. The degradation of mechanical properties should ideally be compatibleto the tissue regeneration. With this new approach, an iterative process of optimizationis possible to achieve an ideal solution in terms of mechanical behavior anddegradation time. The scaffold can therefore be pre-validated in terms of functionalcompatibility. An example of application of this approach is demonstrated at the endof this chapter