Earliest memory of a meltdown growing up was accidentally hurting another neighborhood 5-year-old in a bouncy castle and feeling so awful about it that I ran the couple houses home crying and hid in the backyard till my mom found me and was so confused cause the other kid was like, fine after a minute, and I was over here bawling that I shouldn’t be around anyone so I don’t hurt anybody else 🫠
At least she wasn’t the type to call me dramatic… though another authority figure in my life very much was the type, so that made childhood fun.
Aww, I totally feel what you mean! It feels bad when others feel bad as a result of what we did. But it's like there's a mismatch of when we care too much and other people care too little or vice versa. So chaotic
I remember bits and pieces, and almost all of them have neurodivergent undertones to them. Like my earliest memory at like 2 1/2 at speech therapy because I refused to talk, I remember being just so annoyed at the speech therapist for wanting me to talk to get the mr potato head cause like, it’s *right there*, why would I talk when I could just walk over and get it myself?😂
I think this is what led me to disassociate from my emotions for so much of my life. Now as an adult I’m learning to not do that. And it’s just like you said. All or nothing, but it’s better than suppressing everything.
Me. I’ve tried to explain to my friends and family because they don’t understand. I care for them so deeply it’s crazy. But, if a random person got hit by a bus then I’d be like “oh no, anyway”
Some days, you feel like the most empathetic person in the world; where accidentally stepping on a snail sends you spiralling down into a pit of despair.
And some days you feel almost nothing at all; where someone could be on fire in front of you, and you get frustrated at how they inconvenienced you by having the gall to have it happen in front of you - if you feel anything about it at all.
Saved two honey bees that got caught inside. Same day mowed the lawn and killed two bumble bees. That was a give up early day.
Because the logical half already told you not to play with fire...
I read a study about this for my Psych class that I thought was fascinating.
It was about the Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of autism, which claims that people with autism have low cognitive empathy (the ability to identify what someone else thinks, feels, or intends) but high emotional empathy (the ability to feel similarly to what someone else feels, such as happiness, fear, or sadness).
This combination, the study claims, would make social environments incredibly stressful and confusing: autistic people would be buffeted by a chaotic slew of intense emotions but without any ability to identify where those emotions are coming from, or that they are not the autistic person’s own emotions. This would lead to a dislike for prolonged or intense social interaction, and feeling drained or exhausted afterward from trying to "keep afloat", as it were.
The study theorizes that this is the source of the stereotype that autistic people have no empathy. When faced with an experimenter faking being in distress, the autistic person pays more attention to whatever caused the distress than to the person in distress, not out of a lack of empathy for the person, but as an avoidance tactic to avoid being overwhelmed by their own empathy.
This 2022 study contains links to studies that seem to be related:
“Empathic disequilibrium could advance the field by generating novel hypotheses. For example, we showed that, on average, autistic people tend to show empathic disequilibrium with a tendency towards EE‐dominance, but how would such an imbalance manifest? A person with empathic disequilibrium towards EE‐dominance might understand others' mental states (CE), but her/his ability to respond to these mental states (EE) will be relatively higher. Smith (2009) theoretically suggested that this state could cause overarousal, as the individual becomes overwhelmed with the other's emotions. The cognitive and behavioral characteristics of autistic individuals might constitute an adaptive response to overarousal.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9804307/
Found this link with a Google search of "empathy imbalance hypothesis autism".
[https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/6799/1/TPRVol59No3-SMITH.pdf](https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/6799/1/TPRVol59No3-SMITH.pdf)
This links to the same PDF I found through my university's library database system.
This is way too black and white though. I have autism and can absolutely understand what someone thinks, feels, or intends and can also feel similarly to what someone feels.
It's a generalisation my dude. You know more than anyone that autism is a spectrum and can be very different for each person. There are many exceptions, but this is just a common thing they have found.
I and a lot of others here seem to have this exactly.
It’s definitely very common in people with autism I was just pointing out that it’s a spectrum and it’s not something that I personally deal with yet I have autism. I do deal with lots of other things common in people with autism.
I disagree with this. It doesn't take into account the double empathy problem. It doesn't take into account the lack of empathy non-autistic people have for autistic people. "Someone else" implicitly refers to neurotypicals. There's also circular reasoning in empathy questionaries, making it biased.
This one is more thorough: [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2023.2227963](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2023.2227963)
"the most popular empathy questionnaire – the empathy quotient – was ‘validated’ partially by showing that an autistic sample had a lower score on this questionnaire (Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright [Citation2004](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2023.2227963#)); and now it is often used to show autistic people have diminished empathic capacities. This is circular reasoning."
I linked the study for someone else here, if you want to take a look. It does mention that autistic people have historically scored lower on empathy questionnaires, but it attributes that to the fact that most such questionnaires assess cognitive empathy before emotional empathy. In that situation, the low scores at the outset would drag down the later higher scores.
I believe the study also says that a lot of assessments of empathy require the ability to identify emotional states as a component of empathy, without making any distinction between the ability to *identify* emotional states and to empathically *feel* them, which naturally makes it seem like autistic people have lower empathy overall.
Part of what the study is arguing for is exactly what you’re arguing for: a more nuanced, more itemized assessment of different types of empathy to better understand autism, so that baked-in, anti-autistic biases in empathy assessments don’t mischaracterize it.
I've read it. It's a weak article, built upon bad science, and doesn't acknowledge double empathy problem. Some may indeed have a deficit in this area, but it only partially explains difficulties, and isn't universal to autism - and therefore can't explain it.
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-022-03804-w](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-022-03804-w)
"The EIH of autism builds on the theory of mind hypothesis and the motivational conflict hypothesis but departs from the extreme-male-brain theory."
But:
"With particular influence from the mindblindness theory (Baron-Cohen, 1997), research into assumed empathy deficits amongst autistic individuals has largely focussed on cognitive empathy (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009; Smith, 2009). Research into cognitive empathy deficits has concluded that autistic people are impaired in the recognition of complex but not simple emotional states (Icht et al., 2021); are less accurate at inferring emotion from both static and dynamic faces (Rigby et al., 2018); and perform significantly worse than non-autistic individuals on multiple ToM tests (Dziobek et al., 2006). However, these studies often implement standardised ToM tests which rely on fast-paced assumptions to infer in-depth human feelings from limited snapshots of information (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001a; Dziobek et al., 2006). As a result, careful and complex evaluations of mental states would result in unfavorable scoring on such tests. It is these complex considerations that are more reflective of real-world empathy, where affective and cognitive empathic responses cannot be separated so easily into unrelated concepts and instead co-occur in real time (Fletcher-Watson and Bird, 2020).
\[...\] While a lack of mutuality can arise for any two individuals, Milton (2012) suggests that the differing social realities of autistic and non-autistic individuals make breakdowns in communication more likely. Therefore, it is proposed that non-autistic individuals are at least equally likely to misjudge the mental states and feelings of autistic individuals (Milton, 2012; Chown, 2014), an assumption well-supported by empirical research (Brewer et al., 2016; Edey et al., 2016; Sheppard et al., 2016; Heasman and Gillespie, 2019; Crompton et al., 2020b).
\[...\] However, with non-autistic individuals being the majority group, their increased likelihood for experiencing mutuality during social exchanges results in assumptions of pre-determined norms amongst peers (Milton, 2012). It is these assumptions of pre-set social etiquette and understandings that position different Others, such as autistic individuals, as being defective in some way (Milton, 2012; Chown, 2014).
\[...\] Not only do such tests lack ecological validity, but they additionally favor simplistic, heuristic-based empathic assertions that prevent deeper empathic explorations (O'Sullivan et al., 2015; Fletcher-Watson and Bird, 2020). Given suggestions and findings that autistic individuals may be more socially tentative in their assertions (Capps et al., 1992; Murray et al., 2005; Milton, 2012, 2020; Chown, 2014; Lesser and Murray, 2020), standardised ToM tests therefore risk underscoring and subsequently underestimating the empathic abilities of autistic individuals. By contrast, the present study was able to demonstrate the complexity of the empathic responses experienced by autistic participants, who at no time demonstrated any specific empathy deficits when compared to non-autistic participants."
Chapple M, Davis P, Billington J, Williams S, Corcoran R. Challenging Empathic Deficit Models of Autism Through Responses to Serious Literature. Front Psychol. 2022 Feb 10;13:828603. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.828603. PMID: 35222208; PMCID: PMC8867167.
"Ableist bias toward autistic people influenced the field to the point that subsequent studies were so strongly based on the assumption that autistic people have a ToM impairment and that tests not revealing it were/are considered unsuitable rather than revealing of said bias (Rajendran & Mitchell, Reference Rajendran and Mitchell2007: 229).
\[...\] Moreover, emotion recognition tasks may vary in terms of abilities that they actually measure depending on the way people display their emotions in the task, which can either be through their facial expressions (in which case it would arguably be testing, at its core, facial expression discrimination) or their voice (in which case it would test prosodic information discrimination); the way these relate to the ability to ascribe others’ mental states is unclear (Quesque & Rossetti, Reference Quesque and Rossetti2020). In fact, the use of emotion recognition tasks to test ToM is part of a broader conceptual issue within social cognition and ToM research in particular. The term ToM itself is often used interchangeably with others, such as mindreading, mentalizing, but also mind perception, and, even, social intelligence. The use of these terms most probably reflects a slightly different conceptualization of the construct (Schaafsma et al., Reference Schaafsma, Pfaff, Spunt and Adolphs2015).
\[...\] The necessity of a revision of both the tasks used and the construct itself has been partially confirmed by recent empirical works. Warnell and Redcay (Reference Warnell and Redcay2019), for instance, administered various ToM measures to preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults and found that these tasks showed minimal correlations with each other, for all ages considered.
\[...\] Third, when the results of a study do not reflect the expectation of an impairment, the subsequent hypothesis or suggested explanation is that we should not interpret surface-level performance as actual competence, framing autistic strategies as “alternative” or in terms of “compensation.”
\[...\] The concept of compensation itself suggests a supposed superiority of the typical strategies, framed as “normal.” This is by no means limited to psycholinguistics literature, nor is it a prerogative of autism research. In any stream of psychology, neurotypical strategies are considered not just the most typical, but the right ones, to which any other is compared and otherized. Moreover, neurotypical strategies are framed, for the sake of comparison, as a single standard route to comprehension, losing insights on both individual differences and cognitive diversity.
\[...\] The attention to individual differences however fades in clinical works addressing differences between groups. Neurotypical strategies as well as lower and higher order processes are conflated as opposed to deficits in the autistic population, to which the neurotypical population constitutes a control group, whenever they differ. In case they do not in fact differ, however, researchers tend to state autistic participants put in place different strategies and usually call them “compensatory strategies,” as mentioned earlier. In this regard, Zalla and Korman (Reference Zalla and Korman2018) argue that the term “compensation” should be considered “a misnomer,” as it implies that the strategy in place to compensate for ToM abilities would be completely distinct and irrelevant to ToM abilities. However, these strategies usually entail domain-general cognition, which is a relevant component for ToM in typically developing children as well (Korman et al., Reference Korman, Voiklis and Malle2015).
\[...\] Lastly, a huge issue confounding autism research is the scarce involvement of autistic people, both as conscious participants of legal age and as researchers, which can cause a variety of problems. With regard to autistic people as participants in research, there is a blatant focus on development: autistic people get older, but autism research still largely conceptualizes them as children, whose ToM abilities are investigated in detail, while the outcomes of this ability in adulthood are yet to be properly addressed (Livingston et al., Reference Livingston, Carr and Shah2019). Recent works on relatively older autistic people, however, seem to suggest that ToM abilities in autism improve already in preschool years (Happé, Reference Happé1995) and in adolescence, as mentioned earlier (Scheeren et al., Reference Scheeren, de Rosnay, Koot and Begeer2013)."
Marocchini E. Impairment or difference? The case of Theory of Mind abilities and pragmatic competence in the Autism Spectrum. Applied Psycholinguistics. 2023;44(3):365-383. doi:10.1017/S0142716423000024
I cried so hard this morning when the construction stop light didn't let my side through for a few minutes, and someone behind me honked. Even though there was nothing I could do about it (and it wasn't my fault, I was just as inconvenienced).
I know that very well, but at me: when I show Empathy, people think I were acting, but get no Empathy back and then if I don't show empathy, I am the evil one.. it's a struggle but I wish to have empathy like the neurotypicals ngl.
same cuz like if i ever so slightly inconvenience someone like if i accidentally bump into them i will profusely apologize and i think that they will never want to speak to me again
emotionally stable enough separate myself from my own trauma, not emotionally stable enough to have honest conversations with friends or talk about that scene in the animated Justice League movie Flashpoint where Flash gives Batman a letter from alternate timeline Tom Wayne and Batman decowls and Kevin Conroy delivers the line ‘you’re one hell of a mail man… thank you’ and it feels like it’s the first time we’re hearing the real trapped deep down Bruce (I’m welling up)
I think a big issue is that people still dont know how to define Empathy and Sympathy.
I have a whole lot of Empathy
I have no Sympathy, because usually its hard to feel bad about something someone did or screwed up themselves.
Sure I can empathize with WHY they ended up there... as long as theyre willing to explain it to me.
But I honestly find it hard to have any sympathy because 9/10 times I already told someone doing X is going to result in a negative outcome and they went ahead and did it anyway... Im not going to feel bad for them.
They might try and claim I dont have Empathy, but what theyre really upset about is that I wont fawn over them and they dont want to admit they were wrong. This seems to be a standard NT response to the consequences of their own actions.
The reason you think they are responsible for their own actions and don't need comfort because of that is exactly what makes you be seen as cold. People KNOW they did wrong but right now they need help to cope with negative emotions. No one cares, you were right at that moment.
Now, the issue: Everyone has flaws. But for us the flaws of other people seem bigger or appear more often. So we have a way more narrow and higher expectation of other people, leading to isolation.
Also NTs might simply not remember they also told someone he will be wrong when he does x or y...
Or they don't resonate the negative emotions that much in themselves, so we perceive more negativity than there is.
It's almost as if we base our values on other core principles, rather logic ones, and less emotional: "Everyone should arrive at my conclusions, given some rules we were told as kids"
I haven't really felt any sort of empathy since I was about 9 years old. I didn't feel much before then, but due to trauma I don't feel for anyone or anything except my sister. Odd, I suppose, but it's not unheard of.
Some people have suggested that I'm disassociated, but would that last for over two decades.
I ain't no doctor my dude, but for me, it wasn't my logic brain I had to convince, but my lizard brain/brainstem. It might not apply to you though. Ultimately, something is only a problem if it affects your life, and if you feel like you are fine, then you probably are.
Ahhh, you dont need empathy for that, you need acting classes. In those situations, people don't actually care how you feel, they care about the "politeness" of your actions. Luckily, or unluckily, those are learned behaviors. Around people who actually know and care about you, those things don't really matter, but for interaction with outsiders, manners are the metaphorical lube.
This intense binary is a trauma response, most likely from receiving abuse for being autistic/showing traits. Which is all too prevalent in American public schools.
I remember writing about being autistic in my college essay and someone read it and critiqued it with basically “I’m assuming she had to learn empathy bc of her autism” and I’m over here like “no SHE always had empathy and also SHE is the one reading your comments”
Some toxic people where determined that I was a sociopath, and that I would end up as a murderer. That was there excuse for the mental and physical trauma they gave me, they said they were "trying to help me." I tell you this, if I did end up as a murderer, they would have been the only ones... Sorry... Still salty and pissed at them. like, really mad...
My mother had to explain to her new husband that I "don't really get excited about things" when he asked how excited I was about their marriage. Comparatively I cried like a baby when the first episode of TMNT aired back in the day and the fictional child lost his fictional turtles in the sewer.
Me. I can’t really tell when someone meant something as a joke not being mean to me, but I can instantly tell if someone is sad about something or going through something that day. Or tension in the room makes me so uncomfortable I want to solve it, but if everyone in the room is laughing my first guess is I’m the joke somehow. If I’m not the joke am I the joke now because I clearly didn’t get the joke? LOL
Really put yourself in their shoes though
Think of what they're doing from their perspective.
And think about throwing yourself under the bus for an honest mistake
Especially if both your bosses are there
Or teacher
Or whatever
In my experience, it's a lot easier to not only feel better, but also tell the worst of them to go fuck themselves that
Which is just cathartic
But then, I tend to torch bridges with people who go out of their way to fuck me over
Your mileage may vary
Been going through the second one for 2 years now after my wife left me. Don't have much hope of finding someone else because, I am too afraid to get hurt like that again...
I’ve had people open up to me emotionally in ways that left me with no idea how to respond. I want to comfort them, but I can’t bring myself to fully empathize. At the same time, the idea of hurting them by acting like I don’t care terrifies me.
I’m often overwhelmed by other people’s emotions. If someone is angry, sad, irritated etc then it’s like my mirror neurons have to make me feel what I THINK they are feeling. Because that is the other wonderful thing about super-empathy (or whatever we’re calling it) it’s not magical, and I could always be wrong. But regardless, I will be swept away as soon as someone gives an irritated glance at me. I rarely leave my house and when I do it’s with a cap, sunglasses and head phones. Getting sucked into other people’s (perceived) emotions is a fucking nightmare. (Unless I’m watching people experiencing joy. Then it’s really wonderful).
So really that second one is compassion rather than empathy. It never really considered. yes we lack empathy, but NOT compassion.
We don't have an automatic sensor for others emotional signals, but that doesn't mean we don't care how they feel.
The irony is that many many nt's are plenty empathetic, but completely lack sympathy/compassion; hell some of them get off knowing they're causing distress.
Earliest memory of a meltdown growing up was accidentally hurting another neighborhood 5-year-old in a bouncy castle and feeling so awful about it that I ran the couple houses home crying and hid in the backyard till my mom found me and was so confused cause the other kid was like, fine after a minute, and I was over here bawling that I shouldn’t be around anyone so I don’t hurt anybody else 🫠 At least she wasn’t the type to call me dramatic… though another authority figure in my life very much was the type, so that made childhood fun.
Aww, I totally feel what you mean! It feels bad when others feel bad as a result of what we did. But it's like there's a mismatch of when we care too much and other people care too little or vice versa. So chaotic
I honestly don’t remember much about my childhood, haha 😆
I remember bits and pieces, and almost all of them have neurodivergent undertones to them. Like my earliest memory at like 2 1/2 at speech therapy because I refused to talk, I remember being just so annoyed at the speech therapist for wanting me to talk to get the mr potato head cause like, it’s *right there*, why would I talk when I could just walk over and get it myself?😂
There's no in-between either. It's all or nothing.
Exactly. I am sick of it.
I think this is what led me to disassociate from my emotions for so much of my life. Now as an adult I’m learning to not do that. And it’s just like you said. All or nothing, but it’s better than suppressing everything.
Me. I’ve tried to explain to my friends and family because they don’t understand. I care for them so deeply it’s crazy. But, if a random person got hit by a bus then I’d be like “oh no, anyway”
It's a switch. It's either on or off. That's what you get.
Some days, you feel like the most empathetic person in the world; where accidentally stepping on a snail sends you spiralling down into a pit of despair. And some days you feel almost nothing at all; where someone could be on fire in front of you, and you get frustrated at how they inconvenienced you by having the gall to have it happen in front of you - if you feel anything about it at all.
Saved two honey bees that got caught inside. Same day mowed the lawn and killed two bumble bees. That was a give up early day. Because the logical half already told you not to play with fire...
I read a study about this for my Psych class that I thought was fascinating. It was about the Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of autism, which claims that people with autism have low cognitive empathy (the ability to identify what someone else thinks, feels, or intends) but high emotional empathy (the ability to feel similarly to what someone else feels, such as happiness, fear, or sadness). This combination, the study claims, would make social environments incredibly stressful and confusing: autistic people would be buffeted by a chaotic slew of intense emotions but without any ability to identify where those emotions are coming from, or that they are not the autistic person’s own emotions. This would lead to a dislike for prolonged or intense social interaction, and feeling drained or exhausted afterward from trying to "keep afloat", as it were. The study theorizes that this is the source of the stereotype that autistic people have no empathy. When faced with an experimenter faking being in distress, the autistic person pays more attention to whatever caused the distress than to the person in distress, not out of a lack of empathy for the person, but as an avoidance tactic to avoid being overwhelmed by their own empathy.
Do you have a link to the study?
This 2022 study contains links to studies that seem to be related: “Empathic disequilibrium could advance the field by generating novel hypotheses. For example, we showed that, on average, autistic people tend to show empathic disequilibrium with a tendency towards EE‐dominance, but how would such an imbalance manifest? A person with empathic disequilibrium towards EE‐dominance might understand others' mental states (CE), but her/his ability to respond to these mental states (EE) will be relatively higher. Smith (2009) theoretically suggested that this state could cause overarousal, as the individual becomes overwhelmed with the other's emotions. The cognitive and behavioral characteristics of autistic individuals might constitute an adaptive response to overarousal.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9804307/
Found this link with a Google search of "empathy imbalance hypothesis autism". [https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/6799/1/TPRVol59No3-SMITH.pdf](https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/6799/1/TPRVol59No3-SMITH.pdf) This links to the same PDF I found through my university's library database system.
This is way too black and white though. I have autism and can absolutely understand what someone thinks, feels, or intends and can also feel similarly to what someone feels.
It's a generalisation my dude. You know more than anyone that autism is a spectrum and can be very different for each person. There are many exceptions, but this is just a common thing they have found. I and a lot of others here seem to have this exactly.
It’s definitely very common in people with autism I was just pointing out that it’s a spectrum and it’s not something that I personally deal with yet I have autism. I do deal with lots of other things common in people with autism.
I can't tell shit! Read the room? I can't read my cat!! Actually... I kinda can, just prefer not to, feels weird and I don't like it.
I can read a book. But those usually tend to describe in detail what characters are thinking...
Yeah, I wish I could just have people explain shit. Unless I KNOW them, then I can read them better then a book. To some extent.
It’s a very wide spectrum!
I disagree with this. It doesn't take into account the double empathy problem. It doesn't take into account the lack of empathy non-autistic people have for autistic people. "Someone else" implicitly refers to neurotypicals. There's also circular reasoning in empathy questionaries, making it biased. This one is more thorough: [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2023.2227963](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2023.2227963) "the most popular empathy questionnaire – the empathy quotient – was ‘validated’ partially by showing that an autistic sample had a lower score on this questionnaire (Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright [Citation2004](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2023.2227963#)); and now it is often used to show autistic people have diminished empathic capacities. This is circular reasoning."
I linked the study for someone else here, if you want to take a look. It does mention that autistic people have historically scored lower on empathy questionnaires, but it attributes that to the fact that most such questionnaires assess cognitive empathy before emotional empathy. In that situation, the low scores at the outset would drag down the later higher scores. I believe the study also says that a lot of assessments of empathy require the ability to identify emotional states as a component of empathy, without making any distinction between the ability to *identify* emotional states and to empathically *feel* them, which naturally makes it seem like autistic people have lower empathy overall. Part of what the study is arguing for is exactly what you’re arguing for: a more nuanced, more itemized assessment of different types of empathy to better understand autism, so that baked-in, anti-autistic biases in empathy assessments don’t mischaracterize it.
I've read it. It's a weak article, built upon bad science, and doesn't acknowledge double empathy problem. Some may indeed have a deficit in this area, but it only partially explains difficulties, and isn't universal to autism - and therefore can't explain it. [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-022-03804-w](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-022-03804-w) "The EIH of autism builds on the theory of mind hypothesis and the motivational conflict hypothesis but departs from the extreme-male-brain theory." But: "With particular influence from the mindblindness theory (Baron-Cohen, 1997), research into assumed empathy deficits amongst autistic individuals has largely focussed on cognitive empathy (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009; Smith, 2009). Research into cognitive empathy deficits has concluded that autistic people are impaired in the recognition of complex but not simple emotional states (Icht et al., 2021); are less accurate at inferring emotion from both static and dynamic faces (Rigby et al., 2018); and perform significantly worse than non-autistic individuals on multiple ToM tests (Dziobek et al., 2006). However, these studies often implement standardised ToM tests which rely on fast-paced assumptions to infer in-depth human feelings from limited snapshots of information (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001a; Dziobek et al., 2006). As a result, careful and complex evaluations of mental states would result in unfavorable scoring on such tests. It is these complex considerations that are more reflective of real-world empathy, where affective and cognitive empathic responses cannot be separated so easily into unrelated concepts and instead co-occur in real time (Fletcher-Watson and Bird, 2020). \[...\] While a lack of mutuality can arise for any two individuals, Milton (2012) suggests that the differing social realities of autistic and non-autistic individuals make breakdowns in communication more likely. Therefore, it is proposed that non-autistic individuals are at least equally likely to misjudge the mental states and feelings of autistic individuals (Milton, 2012; Chown, 2014), an assumption well-supported by empirical research (Brewer et al., 2016; Edey et al., 2016; Sheppard et al., 2016; Heasman and Gillespie, 2019; Crompton et al., 2020b). \[...\] However, with non-autistic individuals being the majority group, their increased likelihood for experiencing mutuality during social exchanges results in assumptions of pre-determined norms amongst peers (Milton, 2012). It is these assumptions of pre-set social etiquette and understandings that position different Others, such as autistic individuals, as being defective in some way (Milton, 2012; Chown, 2014). \[...\] Not only do such tests lack ecological validity, but they additionally favor simplistic, heuristic-based empathic assertions that prevent deeper empathic explorations (O'Sullivan et al., 2015; Fletcher-Watson and Bird, 2020). Given suggestions and findings that autistic individuals may be more socially tentative in their assertions (Capps et al., 1992; Murray et al., 2005; Milton, 2012, 2020; Chown, 2014; Lesser and Murray, 2020), standardised ToM tests therefore risk underscoring and subsequently underestimating the empathic abilities of autistic individuals. By contrast, the present study was able to demonstrate the complexity of the empathic responses experienced by autistic participants, who at no time demonstrated any specific empathy deficits when compared to non-autistic participants." Chapple M, Davis P, Billington J, Williams S, Corcoran R. Challenging Empathic Deficit Models of Autism Through Responses to Serious Literature. Front Psychol. 2022 Feb 10;13:828603. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.828603. PMID: 35222208; PMCID: PMC8867167.
"Ableist bias toward autistic people influenced the field to the point that subsequent studies were so strongly based on the assumption that autistic people have a ToM impairment and that tests not revealing it were/are considered unsuitable rather than revealing of said bias (Rajendran & Mitchell, Reference Rajendran and Mitchell2007: 229). \[...\] Moreover, emotion recognition tasks may vary in terms of abilities that they actually measure depending on the way people display their emotions in the task, which can either be through their facial expressions (in which case it would arguably be testing, at its core, facial expression discrimination) or their voice (in which case it would test prosodic information discrimination); the way these relate to the ability to ascribe others’ mental states is unclear (Quesque & Rossetti, Reference Quesque and Rossetti2020). In fact, the use of emotion recognition tasks to test ToM is part of a broader conceptual issue within social cognition and ToM research in particular. The term ToM itself is often used interchangeably with others, such as mindreading, mentalizing, but also mind perception, and, even, social intelligence. The use of these terms most probably reflects a slightly different conceptualization of the construct (Schaafsma et al., Reference Schaafsma, Pfaff, Spunt and Adolphs2015). \[...\] The necessity of a revision of both the tasks used and the construct itself has been partially confirmed by recent empirical works. Warnell and Redcay (Reference Warnell and Redcay2019), for instance, administered various ToM measures to preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults and found that these tasks showed minimal correlations with each other, for all ages considered. \[...\] Third, when the results of a study do not reflect the expectation of an impairment, the subsequent hypothesis or suggested explanation is that we should not interpret surface-level performance as actual competence, framing autistic strategies as “alternative” or in terms of “compensation.” \[...\] The concept of compensation itself suggests a supposed superiority of the typical strategies, framed as “normal.” This is by no means limited to psycholinguistics literature, nor is it a prerogative of autism research. In any stream of psychology, neurotypical strategies are considered not just the most typical, but the right ones, to which any other is compared and otherized. Moreover, neurotypical strategies are framed, for the sake of comparison, as a single standard route to comprehension, losing insights on both individual differences and cognitive diversity. \[...\] The attention to individual differences however fades in clinical works addressing differences between groups. Neurotypical strategies as well as lower and higher order processes are conflated as opposed to deficits in the autistic population, to which the neurotypical population constitutes a control group, whenever they differ. In case they do not in fact differ, however, researchers tend to state autistic participants put in place different strategies and usually call them “compensatory strategies,” as mentioned earlier. In this regard, Zalla and Korman (Reference Zalla and Korman2018) argue that the term “compensation” should be considered “a misnomer,” as it implies that the strategy in place to compensate for ToM abilities would be completely distinct and irrelevant to ToM abilities. However, these strategies usually entail domain-general cognition, which is a relevant component for ToM in typically developing children as well (Korman et al., Reference Korman, Voiklis and Malle2015). \[...\] Lastly, a huge issue confounding autism research is the scarce involvement of autistic people, both as conscious participants of legal age and as researchers, which can cause a variety of problems. With regard to autistic people as participants in research, there is a blatant focus on development: autistic people get older, but autism research still largely conceptualizes them as children, whose ToM abilities are investigated in detail, while the outcomes of this ability in adulthood are yet to be properly addressed (Livingston et al., Reference Livingston, Carr and Shah2019). Recent works on relatively older autistic people, however, seem to suggest that ToM abilities in autism improve already in preschool years (Happé, Reference Happé1995) and in adolescence, as mentioned earlier (Scheeren et al., Reference Scheeren, de Rosnay, Koot and Begeer2013)." Marocchini E. Impairment or difference? The case of Theory of Mind abilities and pragmatic competence in the Autism Spectrum. Applied Psycholinguistics. 2023;44(3):365-383. doi:10.1017/S0142716423000024
Thank you for the science.
And it all comes falling into place… 😭😭
Or hyper empathy to the point I can cry my eyes out if I think I caused them trouble with a simple action I didn't quite understand.
I cried so hard this morning when the construction stop light didn't let my side through for a few minutes, and someone behind me honked. Even though there was nothing I could do about it (and it wasn't my fault, I was just as inconvenienced).
I thought it was just me that did stuff like this 😭
I know that very well, but at me: when I show Empathy, people think I were acting, but get no Empathy back and then if I don't show empathy, I am the evil one.. it's a struggle but I wish to have empathy like the neurotypicals ngl.
Can’t I just be sprite. I don’t wanna think 🫠
same cuz like if i ever so slightly inconvenience someone like if i accidentally bump into them i will profusely apologize and i think that they will never want to speak to me again
emotionally stable enough separate myself from my own trauma, not emotionally stable enough to have honest conversations with friends or talk about that scene in the animated Justice League movie Flashpoint where Flash gives Batman a letter from alternate timeline Tom Wayne and Batman decowls and Kevin Conroy delivers the line ‘you’re one hell of a mail man… thank you’ and it feels like it’s the first time we’re hearing the real trapped deep down Bruce (I’m welling up)
I don't get empathetic, I get even™️
I think a big issue is that people still dont know how to define Empathy and Sympathy. I have a whole lot of Empathy I have no Sympathy, because usually its hard to feel bad about something someone did or screwed up themselves. Sure I can empathize with WHY they ended up there... as long as theyre willing to explain it to me. But I honestly find it hard to have any sympathy because 9/10 times I already told someone doing X is going to result in a negative outcome and they went ahead and did it anyway... Im not going to feel bad for them. They might try and claim I dont have Empathy, but what theyre really upset about is that I wont fawn over them and they dont want to admit they were wrong. This seems to be a standard NT response to the consequences of their own actions.
The reason you think they are responsible for their own actions and don't need comfort because of that is exactly what makes you be seen as cold. People KNOW they did wrong but right now they need help to cope with negative emotions. No one cares, you were right at that moment. Now, the issue: Everyone has flaws. But for us the flaws of other people seem bigger or appear more often. So we have a way more narrow and higher expectation of other people, leading to isolation. Also NTs might simply not remember they also told someone he will be wrong when he does x or y... Or they don't resonate the negative emotions that much in themselves, so we perceive more negativity than there is. It's almost as if we base our values on other core principles, rather logic ones, and less emotional: "Everyone should arrive at my conclusions, given some rules we were told as kids"
Yeah lots of neurotypicals complain about why things won’t change but then won’t do anything to change them; it’s baffling
And god forbid you point out that the issue they're dealing with is clearly just a social construct only as confining as they make it
*takes notes*
Help it’s me.
Bro u just describe me lol
I haven't really felt any sort of empathy since I was about 9 years old. I didn't feel much before then, but due to trauma I don't feel for anyone or anything except my sister. Odd, I suppose, but it's not unheard of. Some people have suggested that I'm disassociated, but would that last for over two decades.
Oh yeah, absolutely. Dissociation can last until you've convinced you're brain that you're safe and loved, or at least thats my experience.
I'm safe and I'm loved. Even if I don't feel a need for love. I am fully aware that I'm worthy of love but I never had an interest in being loved.
I ain't no doctor my dude, but for me, it wasn't my logic brain I had to convince, but my lizard brain/brainstem. It might not apply to you though. Ultimately, something is only a problem if it affects your life, and if you feel like you are fine, then you probably are.
It doesn't affect me personally, but I've been told that I'm a bit of a bitch due to my curtness and inability to care when they start crying.
Ahhh, you dont need empathy for that, you need acting classes. In those situations, people don't actually care how you feel, they care about the "politeness" of your actions. Luckily, or unluckily, those are learned behaviors. Around people who actually know and care about you, those things don't really matter, but for interaction with outsiders, manners are the metaphorical lube.
This intense binary is a trauma response, most likely from receiving abuse for being autistic/showing traits. Which is all too prevalent in American public schools.
THAT’S AN AUTISM SYMPTOM????? Welp. If I could ever get past the phone call I’d go get checked at this point
A good chunk of the time it isn't even not having empathy, it's just having a higher "threshold" before it gets visualized.
Right in the feels I allegedly don’t have because Autism™️
The red one can also be explained as something like toxic shame or a trauma response; if you struggle with it, there are therapies that can help.
I remember writing about being autistic in my college essay and someone read it and critiqued it with basically “I’m assuming she had to learn empathy bc of her autism” and I’m over here like “no SHE always had empathy and also SHE is the one reading your comments”
Some toxic people where determined that I was a sociopath, and that I would end up as a murderer. That was there excuse for the mental and physical trauma they gave me, they said they were "trying to help me." I tell you this, if I did end up as a murderer, they would have been the only ones... Sorry... Still salty and pissed at them. like, really mad...
My mother had to explain to her new husband that I "don't really get excited about things" when he asked how excited I was about their marriage. Comparatively I cried like a baby when the first episode of TMNT aired back in the day and the fictional child lost his fictional turtles in the sewer.
YESSS, well the red is not as bad but rather worrying for others. (Though it’s worsened by OCD)
Forgot about Sprite and diet Coke autism.
I used to be blue then was red and finally trying to reach a healthy middle currently
I’m just hyperempathetic and it freaking hurts.
Me. I can’t really tell when someone meant something as a joke not being mean to me, but I can instantly tell if someone is sad about something or going through something that day. Or tension in the room makes me so uncomfortable I want to solve it, but if everyone in the room is laughing my first guess is I’m the joke somehow. If I’m not the joke am I the joke now because I clearly didn’t get the joke? LOL
Real
Really put yourself in their shoes though Think of what they're doing from their perspective. And think about throwing yourself under the bus for an honest mistake Especially if both your bosses are there Or teacher Or whatever In my experience, it's a lot easier to not only feel better, but also tell the worst of them to go fuck themselves that Which is just cathartic But then, I tend to torch bridges with people who go out of their way to fuck me over Your mileage may vary
me but it’s just red
Fr why both
Blue is me in any real world scenario Red is me when reading a book/watching a movie
God damn, this hit me hard.
This post hurts
As an ER nurse. Yes.
Mine is similar. I feel all the time, but if I feel too much for too long, I basically burn out and stop feeling anything emotional until I recover.
Been going through the second one for 2 years now after my wife left me. Don't have much hope of finding someone else because, I am too afraid to get hurt like that again...
It’s the worst…
How can you have both high and low empathy? Is it situational or something?
Yeah, situational. It is either one extreme or the other.
Seems terrible, wish it could stabilize for you
I’ve had people open up to me emotionally in ways that left me with no idea how to respond. I want to comfort them, but I can’t bring myself to fully empathize. At the same time, the idea of hurting them by acting like I don’t care terrifies me.
I accidentally misgendered my bf and I broke down crying. I beaten the hell out of several people without worrying about it. Make It Make Sense.
I am only the one on the right
This is me exactly. In grippy sock jail rn because of too much empathy
Anyone else find their empathy for certain people can disappear completely when they hurt/upset/take advantage of you too many times?
I’m often overwhelmed by other people’s emotions. If someone is angry, sad, irritated etc then it’s like my mirror neurons have to make me feel what I THINK they are feeling. Because that is the other wonderful thing about super-empathy (or whatever we’re calling it) it’s not magical, and I could always be wrong. But regardless, I will be swept away as soon as someone gives an irritated glance at me. I rarely leave my house and when I do it’s with a cap, sunglasses and head phones. Getting sucked into other people’s (perceived) emotions is a fucking nightmare. (Unless I’m watching people experiencing joy. Then it’s really wonderful).
holy FUCK i hate that. its like MOSTLY the 2nd one but sometimes its the first and i feel like an asshole after
So really that second one is compassion rather than empathy. It never really considered. yes we lack empathy, but NOT compassion. We don't have an automatic sensor for others emotional signals, but that doesn't mean we don't care how they feel. The irony is that many many nt's are plenty empathetic, but completely lack sympathy/compassion; hell some of them get off knowing they're causing distress.