Analysis of the EQ test

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I now have 151 answers, and a couple of trends are starting to appear.

1. Many of the so-called empathy questions are related to "Are you good at interpreting facial expressions?", which means they are not empathy questions.

2. Many other issues are related to "Do you tend to say things that are considered socially inappropriate?", which means these are social issues and not empathy issues

3. A whole lot of the questions that are not related to nonverbal communication or social issues have low (or possibly even nonexistent) relation to ASCs

4. The question about cutting up worms is related to "Aspie hunting" and "Have you been fascinated about making traps?". IOW, this is not an empathy issue either.

5. "If anyone asked me if I like their haricut, I would reply truthfully, even if I didn’t like it." has no relevance whatsoever. It's just a stereotype.

6. "It upsets me to see animals in pain." has no relevance whatsoever to ASCs. It is even inversly correlated to "cutting up worms".

IOW, there is no reason to believe that Aspies would lack empathy. The whole EQ-test is extremely narrow and a huge majority of the statements are related to nonverbal communication or social issues.

Rdos,

What is the source of the EQ test?

I agree that a lot of the questions are actually ASD related rather than empathy related (I noticed it too when taking it).

Most of them should be in relation to feeling something when you see people upset/happy over an event that you haven't experienced (empathy), and also more of the, do you care when you see people in distress, questions (empathy).

Generally speaking, with a database of over 400, questions about real empathy has no or very small relevance to ASCs. The relevant questions are of the type "do you know how people feel?" and "can you act accordingly".

You should still probably put "real empathy" questions in there though, as you could disprove the common opinion that AS is primarily a disorder of empathy (see: Gillberg); a separate test would suffice, with diagnosed individuals taking it.

This is of course if you want to show that empathy and ASDs/ASCs aren't related.

(I know I have little to no genuine empathy, but whether that's due to the ASD or not is something I don't know.)

Do you have a suggestion for a real empathy test? I suspect other tests could (unknowingly) confuse problems with reading emotions with lacking empathy. Even the test-takers themselves could do this, and perceive themselves to lack empathy because they have read that Aspies lack empathy, or got such comments after misunderstanding situations. I think the questions about animals / being sad (which is rather easy to read) tells us that Aspies do not lack real empathy more than NTs.

I scanned one of the EQ threads here and it appeared that most aspies scored average, even without considering bias in the test. So I consider that myth 'busted'.