Very, very, very interesting study that Kristina Chew cites--it's from the Baylor College of Medicine and examines the brains of adolescents playing an interactive social game involving exchanging money.

Apparently what happens in "normal" people (the article's word) is that their brains react differently when they're thinking about their money versus the partner's money. This difference isn't present in autistic people:

While the findings are clearly intriguing, it's not yet clear what they mean.
One popular theory of autism is that people with the disorder lack a normal
theory of mind--the ability to imagine the thoughts and actions of others.
Identifying a specific deficit linked to thoughts of self could help narrow
down what has gone wrong in that process. "People think autism is linked to
a lack of understanding of what a partner is doing," says Chiu. "But maybe
they don't understand their own role in the social exchange."

Other scientists interpret the results further, suggesting that this
signal is linked to a sort of internal reputation assessment in the brain. "If
you are a normal person, when you invest money in the game, you are thinking
about how you will look in the eyes of your partner," says Frith. "That's
precisely what the theory of mind hypothesis would project is wrong with people
with autism."

Which interests me b/c the biggest thing I see with Primera isn't that she can't think about how other people feel: it's that she can't seem to predict how her actions will affect people, the same way she can't quite figure out what it means to have a responsibility, to have made a conscious decision to do something that will affect someone else. Some of it is simply that she can't handle criticism or the notion that she's done anything wrong--she's very sensitive to anything resembling criticism. And some of it seems to be what's described: she can't seem to see herself through someone else's eyes.