This is what I think Empathy is...

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Well my take on empathy is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with feeling part of a group. To me, that is something else entirely.

Whereas 'sympathy' is understanding how another person feels, 'empathy' is actually EXPERIENCING another person's emotions oneself.

I have empathy - I often feel another person's emotion. However, this only happens when it is a STRONG emotion. I have little or no empathy for superficial emotions.

I posted an empathy test before. Granted its lame. But how ever you define it or measure it like other traits people on the spectrum have it varies from person to person.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... ht=empathy

I see one person who has been banned scored the lowwest.

I'm the same way. I get strong emotions from some movies where a person is going through grief / despair or is frightened. Strong emotions like these occur only rarely in real life though, so I couldn’t say I feel true empathy very often. Empathy is something subjective that isn’t as easily measured in autistic people because they don’t always express their emotions the way they are supposed to. I think this is where they got the idea that autistic people don’t experience empathy.

I agree that the “being part of a group” thing is different from emotional empathy. It has more to do with knowing what other people expect from you emotionally. I think NT people confuse these two in relation to behaviors because they sometimes go together. They don’t always go together though because some people are good at “playing their part” emotionally, but only do so in order to manipulate or gain the upper hand. This definitely isn’t true empathy.

You completely missed the target. The definition of empathy is the capacity to imagine what another person is likely thinking and feeling in a given context.

Well, if you don't have the capacity to feel and imagine (or share) what other people feel in a given situation, you wont feel part of a group.

Other Kids
Other Kids (we are playing football) -> ball <---me (I think that's an interesting daisy!)
Other Kids

I seemed to have mixed up cause and effect.

I also think that sharing others emotions is a bias - a kind of social delusion, its a dangerous and useful delusion. You wont see a group of Aspie Football Hooligans! Sharing thoughts and feelings in a group can be dangerous, NTs can lose their individuality and can perpetrate awful crimes.

Secondly, Aspies have superior morality. Our behaviors are dictated cognitive empathy, we have to make up for the absence of the social delusion by thinking logically about how we should behave in society. The result is we build up a set rules that inflexibly dictate our proper and correct behavior.

A few months ago I went to the cinema with 2 other Aspies. We stopped at a pedestrian (crosswalk) crossing, because the light was Red for pedestrians. Then I realised two things. All other people around us were ignoring the red light and they were crossing anyway, because there was no traffic. And second, I had met two other people who also inflexibly obey traffic lights.

Superior morality?

My AS*! !

Aspies find rules relaxing because the represent a welcome break from wondering what we are supposed to be doing next, no more, no less...and just like anyone else, we are as moral as we, the individuals, choose to be, or not...

...and the drive to bond with groups is the drive to affiliate, related to "attachment" not empathy, though empathy may have an effect on the quality or nature of attachment.

Let me see if I can find a way to explain that.

When we are born we ARE our whole universe...until we get hungry or thirsty...then we have to figure out what that is and how to deal with it. So, we start figuring out that the universe MAY just be a little bigger and more complcated than we thought it was, and we need to learn how to "work" other parts of it the same way we have to learn how to "work" our fingers and toes...with me so far?

Empathy can be a short cut to learning this, because it helps us to see how other parts of our universe are responding to various actions on our part. Empathy serves the same purpose as a basic phrasebook in an alien language...training us to know that the loud noise in the back of our throat produces the big person with food...lots of empathy probably tells us that the little whimpery noise has the same effect and HEY...the big person with the food is an WHOLE LOT NICER to us...

Attachment and the drive to affiliate are a little different to that. At some point, shortly after we are born, some of us feel, not only hungry and thirsty, but LONELY...

Now, whether we feel lonely BECAUSE we have copped on that unless the big person is around and aware of us the hunger/thirst dyad might get a LEETLE awkward, or because we need the company of the big person in their own right is still debated...

My guess is maybe a little bit of both in most cases.

As we grow and our world gets more complicated by the minute, we discover many more situations that are apt to get sticky without the big person around, many more useful big persons, and a whole heap of time that can get desperately boring without SOME kind of entertainment laid on.

The more empathy we have, the more finely tuned is our "take" on all these things, as a result, it is quite normal for the NT to get "hooked" on affiliation...to the extent of really getting off on stuff like raising their right arms in unison and shouting "Zeig Heil", perhaps because, for at least a moment, it makes them feel invincible, immortal...and in many ways staying sane enough to function depends on denying the possibility of defeat or death, and a little invincibility and immortality can REALLY hit the spot.

Incidentally...

At LEAST the lady aspies I know are usually right there with me at red lights, DARING the oncoming traffic to inconvenience us in some small way.

M

Yes, perhaps empathy can enable the feeling of group belonging (psychologists call ths affiliation). Can someone feel as a part of a group without empathy? Perhaps, in a restricted sense, they would; sadists experience a compulsive drive to control their social environment and satisfy their social needs by dominating others. (Dominance seeking is what psychologists consider the other social-seeking drive to be other than affiliation seeking.)

You refer to emotional contagion (i.e., mass hysteria) rather than to empathy per se. Emotional contagion is when an emotional reaction spreads through people without much reflection on their part; the emotional identification, in other words, remains superficial. The news media likes to encourage this ("zOMG! the summer of sharks!! !! !! !").

Primary psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy (i.e., something much different from the lack of empathy autistic people are sometimes accused of having), and this indifference to others is in part what enables them to do serious harm to others for what is often a trivial personal gain. They are, however, quite able to read people, to size them up.

You must distinguish between obedience and morality. Morality is fundamentally rooted in concern for others (whether compassionately or through a dispassionate moral philosophy rooted in duty). Obedience to rules is meant to create social order rather than social harmony. The Nazis, for example, had many rules that were completely immoral. Your example of pedestrian crossings is not especially relevant to morality (unless one considers a general obedience to the rule of law to be a component of a moral attitude, which I can certainly accept but this is nevertheless not the crucial element).

I think you're mistaking morals for ethics. Morals are beliefs about what is right and wrong and doesn't necessarily involve the impact your actions have on other human beings. Worshipping and fearing God has been considered a sign of good morals throughout most of history for example, something not inspired by the concern for other human beings.

I always thought we just had a stronger sense of self and that any kind of empathy acts as a mediator, and technically, removes us from ourselves for an instant.

Empathy is real, it's just it is not very useful for a developing self. Why should I feel someone elses feelings when they are not mine?

It's not like I am incapable of empathy; I can will it.

What a remarkably astute definition.

Years ago, before ANYONE had ever heard of Aspies, I used to decribe that peculiar quality of Aspiness as being "self contained"...

Let me throw a cat among the pidgeons here...

It is possible that many of the interactive elements we are said to lack are, in fact, not missing in us at all, but, rather, repressed to near non-existance because they are so unusually intense in us as to threaten to overwhelm us.

Could this be so with empathy?

M

If you think you have self control, like I know I do, then HELL YEAH!

Do we lack them, or do we just choose to control them as their intensity may tend to interfere with whatever we may be doing at that moment.

I am sick of people telling us why we don't do this why we don't do that when it can all be reasonably explained.

How can someone say another person lacks something just because they don't show it, and in a lot of cases don't even understand what concept they are referring to? You can experience something without knowing what it is or understanding it, hell thats life right?

Perhaps many of you simply don't even choose to understand empathy, let alone will it. Then all these NT's speak of it gets you all curious and astonished. Remember, mankind(this includes you) does have a thirst for knowing.

Of course you are capable of empathy, or anything they may say you lack, you just haven't had to use it. Anything is possible with your imagination, start using it!

Emotions are poorly described by NT's anyway; look in a dictionary, it's terrible.

I can see someone, anyone, not necessarily an Autie, become incapable of feeling an emotion if they had no situation to activate that emotion. It's as simple as how can you be happy if something you have done or something around you hasn't made you happy. How would you know what happiness was then? Emotions are personal and everything is learned, be it on your own through living, being told by a parent, or reading it from a book.

I can tell you right now I am feeling empathy with all of you because I choose to. I know what its like to be thrown into a social setting with no clue on how you REALLY got there with social rules make no sense and a majority of people who aren't very logical. I know what its like to be completely alien, to walk the streets alone, to have few to no friends, to have people abandon you as a friend because of your social behaviours and your incapablity to not be yourself, to have people give you that weird look like they just can't understand you, like you're not human or just plain stupid.

I am Autistic, and I can do whatever, I am capable of anything I choose to be capable of.

I enjoyed EVERY WORD of that post...


Just FYI...you DO know that pretty much the sanest, most functional of the people who defines AS at present is Borat's cousin?

Scary innit...

M

Never heard of that definition. Although I do believe that people are meant to be defined themselves through there own actions and beliefs rather then by some stooge with a manual.

You have not heard of Simon Baron-Cohen?

Cousin of WORLD FAMOUS BORAT???

Who spent years defining us...

M

Oh, I've heard OF him, but haven't invested much time in his writings.

Probably wise...

Regardless, he seems to be the best of the bunch...the others...

Well...

M