Emotional Empathy (Warning link is a long read)

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I read a piece earlier tonight that I could particularly relate to. The hypothesis was that there are two components of empathy, Cognitive Empathy (CE) and Emotional Empathy (EE), and that autistic people have a deficit of CE but their EE is overactive. One thing that he proposes is that autistic people withdraw socially because they become overwhelmed by the emotional state of people (EE) while not being able to connect to the persons mental state. I personally have always felt this to be the case and I think this is an interesting read. I recommend it but warn you that it's 21 pages long. Here is one thing in the article that particularly liked. I'll paste it here then give you the link. What do you guys think about this?

http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=tpr

The link doesn't work for me I would be super interested in reading it though, as I do find myself rather empathic.

Thank you Rascal77s, I feel very identified with this article.

@ebec11, the link works for me, maybe you can find it by googling. It is titled "The Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of Autism: A Theoretical Approach to Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Autistic Development", by Adam Smith.

Can't wait to read this.

I've had many an awkward moment because I express my empathy inappropriately or at the wrong time. But it's so strong that I can't help it sometimes.

One of the axes of the Intense World Theory is hyperemotionality caused by hyperfunctioning of neural circuits in areas of the brain linked to emotion, but the link between hyperfunctioning of emotional neural circuits and hypofunctioning of social cognition and communication is unclear.

Does hyperfunctioning of emotional neural circuits cause autistic children to automatically avoid engaging in social interaction and communication from birth or the onset of autism and therefore alter, slow, or prevent the development of social cognition and communication during childhood?

I haven't yet read the article, but I'm familiar with cognitive vs emotional empathy. I lack both. I probably have more cognitive empathy.

The link attempts to auto-open a .pdf file which I suppose could fail for a few reasons, even if you do have a PDF reader installed.
Try a 'right-click|save link as' (or your browser's equivalent) on the link to save it directly as a PDF file which you should then be able to open manually with your PDF reader.