Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Sue Nelson exploring autism, empathy and psychopaths.

I want you to listen to a couple of statements and think about whether you agree with them or not. Here's the first.

I can easily tell if someone else is interested

or bored with what I am saying. And the second. If anyone asked me if I liked their haircut,

I would reply truthfully, even if I didn't like it. How did you get on? Personally, I find it hard

to tell if someone's bored when I'm talking and would tell the

truth about someone's haircut. So what does this say about me? Because these questions are taken

from a test used in many countries around the world to measure someone's empathy, which is

generally understood to be an ability to

understand the feelings of others. It's a standard part of an adult autism assessment,

something I did almost five years ago and discovered at the age of 60 that I was autistic.

My diagnosis was a big surprise, but the real shock was the result of

the empathy test, because out of a possible 80 points, I scored a disturbingly low 6. I refused to

believe it at first, and then recalled being told that a friend's dog had died a few months earlier and laughing uncontrollably, although I'm not alone in sometimes responding to situations in an unexpected way.

The team thought we'd done a great job at preparing this child to visit very ill grand in

hospital and they went to the hospital and the child was perfectly well behaved. And when he got

to his gran, he said to her, hello, Gran, when are you going to die?

There's a widely accepted belief that autistic people don't have empathy.

Worse is the stereotype, commonly repeated in the media,

that anyone with little to know empathy is a potential psychopath.

People who have this antisocial personality disorder are self-centered,

display no empathy or remorse, and are often associated with impulsive, violent behaviour.

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