Inability to feel emotion.

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When I was very young, and would suffer an injury, I would look at my parents and depending on whether they showed worry, I would cry or not cry.

These days, I experience a similar thing. If I watch a sad scene in a movie while I am alone, It's no big deal. But if I see the same scene with someone else, I am usually impacted by the scene considerably. The same thing happens at funerals. I am upbeat until I get there, and then can barely hold back tears. This was for a person I barely knew.

I can get slightly melancholy at any time, but my ability to experience high amounts of sadness and grief seems to require another person who expects me to feel these things.

Does anyone else act this way, or know why it happens?

Sometimes I'm confused what words to use for emotional things. It helps to have someone give me the language to use. Do you think you could be using the other person to help by telling you what reaction is appropriate and how to show that reaction?

In spite of not being able to "empathize" with others, I find I have almost empathic abilities. I can feel the energy in the room, and it can affect, if not overwhelm me. I don't cry at someone's funeral, but the emotional tension of the situation is almost physically tangible to me, and it can make me physically ill later on.

I'm like that except the emotions of others around me make no difference either. The only things I get emotional over are things that effect me personally. I would get sad and maybe cry if I lost a favorite possession, but probably not over something bad happening to someone else.

Yes, in a way this tends to occur with myself to a degree.

I barely, if ever laugh by myself, and usually I laugh because of something I say or do when I'm with others, not because of what they do, and I don't know why. All my emotions lean on the side of self-based. When I'm with others all my negative emotions tend to go away almost automatically, sort of like a distraction, unless they are directly related to the person I'm with. This includes irrelevant emotions like anger at someone else, sadness because I went bad on a test etc. I'm heavily dependent on being attached to someone, and if I have no one I can attach to in a social situation I'm hopeless and massively anxious. I have a weird form of empathy, in that it is apparently in tact, but it's quite selfish. Trying to explain it isn't my goal here though.

My memories are sort of clouded right now because I haven't experienced such an emotional situation in quite a while, so I can't really explain what happens properly.

Overall, most of my emotions (particularly the good ones) seem dulled, especially compared to what they used to be. When I should find something hilarious I tend to be mildly amused, just as an example.

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Unapologetically, Norny.
-chronically drunk

I think everyone experiences this to a degree. That's why sitcoms have laugh tracks. You probably just experience this to a larger degree than other people, and/or you're hyperaware of it such that the discrepancy bothers you. Perhaps other people experience this too, but just don't notice that those emotions aren't their own and instead adopt them as their own for that moment in time. It IS your own once you feel it, isn't it? Maybe you're just more aware where you emotions come from because there's no innate masking of it for you as there might be for NTs.

I teared up at my sister's wedding because the groom's sister was tearing up, but it was also at that moment that they were getting married and holding hands and taking vows. I mean, people in general cry at weddings and funerals, but won't at other points in time, even if they ARE grieving at other points in time, or in love with that person at other points in time. There's a ritualistic atmosphere involved, things happening then that make vows salient or the death of someone more...tangible.
Ceremonial burial's a pretty early on cultural phenomenon, (if Civ game tech trees can be trusted). Why is this though? Why is it important? Why is bonding over the death of someone important? Does it matter if that experience happens only because of the atmosphere? Why do people bond in groups at all?

Heck, it's also been studied that people can just make a face of an emotion and they'll start feeling that emotion (psychology student here). And that's nothing to do with autism. It's pretty weird, but it just goes to show that elicitation of emotions isn't just about knowing and thinking about events, as we like to assume it is, but that there's a purely sensory (in this case, with making a face, proprioception) component as well.
It makes sense that someone who's hypersensitive to sensory input in general would then pass that excessive sensory input onto all other parts of their minds, including emotions.

People are social animals, and most emotions themselves only exist through social interactions. All 'secondary' emotions fit this. Eg: jealousy. If this is why so many of our emotions evolved in the first place, just to bond with other people, then emotionally sharing how other people emotionally react has a pretty strong purpose. I'm sure there's got to be some evolutionary psychologist out there who's got a whole theory about this.

It's just the way things work. You're just more sensitive to this particular way of eliciting emotions within yourself.

Since you feel more genuine emotion when you are alone, Stannis, it could be the effort of trying to fit in that just is too much for much else. I get very upset alone sometimes, don't feel genuine around others. But for me, it is from too much struggle making it hard to feel safe, not from any lack of emotion.

I was speaking to some teachers yesterday who were talking about a student they both had taught last year who had died to a drug overdose a few weeks ago.
One of them kept saying how bad she felt for the family, for this kid's sister, for his dad who had been openly and loudly bawling at the funeral she'd gone to.

She was feeling bad because of what the parents would have to go through, she was upset about them because she was placing herself in their shoes and/or physically saw how much pain they had been in. She did also say that it was a waste for such a young person to die, but she was going on about everyone around this kid.

Ultimately, she had gotten caught up in someone else's loss. It's not her loss, that this kid is dead is only affecting her personally because she's mulling it over in her head. But yet her emotions and her reactions were genuine, even though most if not all of them are just reflections for what other people are feeling.

If you don't care about people who have undergone problems such that you think about them, then you just won't experience strong negative emotions when you're alone. Strong, self-eliciting emotions will still, in most cases, revolve around caring about someone else.

Sometimes I have an overwhelming amount of emotion, which makes me feel dissociated. This usually happens in crowds. I feel like people are looking at me, commenting on me, and laughing at me, when I know they're really not. The dissociation I have when I'm in a crowd one time lead me to think that maybe I can sense the energy fields of objects, but I realize that the more likely explanation is that I don't feel separate from the environment.

The rest of the time, I feel emotionless. Depending on the level of emotionlessness, I may or may not feel dissociated. When I feel dissociated when emotionless, I want to create.