I do not lack empathy.

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Anyone else on the spectrum know that you don't lack empathy but it's more like the empathy isn't coming out on time until later when you are outside of the social scene and can examine a social scenario and it hits you later? For example, social cues do not register on time. Sometimes later on it will register. Could be days, months even years. As a result, if someone is actually being rude, I can not call them out on the spot and the emotional impact affects me later. Anyone else have that problem?

I wish people would stop claiming autistics lack empathy and would understand the difference between lacks empathy and theory of mind complications. Over the "autistics lack empathy" people are now confusing narcissism, anti-social personality disorder with autistics. I personally do not get along with narcissists and those who truly do lack empathy as people like that adore attention, manipulative habits and don't care about your personal space and boundaries.

When I have wronged someone, it hurts me once I GET that I hurt someone.

Empathy is definitely different in autistic people. I’m not sure there is a common type or depth of empathy amongst autistics. My guess would be that this is because the empathy from each autistic develops from the individual. There IS influence from the social world, but I don’t think that has as much of an impact as the person’s personal experience and philosophy.

I think neurotypicals largely learn empathy socially, which is why they seem to understand and use it in closely similar ways. Even if they feel LESS empathy than others, most of them have an intellectual understanding of empathy that allows them to say and do the socially correct thing when they choose.

Look here. A very interesting article! Maybe you know it already, because it‘s a rather well known one.

https://network.autism.org.uk/content/n ... not-enough

This is a great post/thread on a subject that I am very much interested in. It’s heavy and delicate at the same time.

I know that I don’t lack empathy, but I have had many experiences where my empathy was slow and showed up at a later date. I attribute this slow arrival to more information being collected in the meantime. So yes, I may have felt empathy immediately but did not internalize or actualize it until later.

I visualize empathy as a spoked wheel, let’s say a bicycle wheel, with the hub being the source of empathy and the spokes radiating from the center of the wheel connecting hub/source with the round traction surface, in this case the tire. There are 4 major spokes to the wheel but we can keep adding more and more to support the process. The wheel is more the model of empathy and how it works, while the feel of empathy is looking at if from the personal felt experience of it.*

*at this point I made a quick departure to get a better grip on my visualization and support it with real wheel facts. To my great surprise I found that an Empathy Wheel exists as a theory outside my imagination. Always a good indication in the veracity of a theory.

To see and read about the Empathy Wheel theory click on the link below.

All About Empathy

What does neuroscience say about empathy? Dr. Paul Wang of Autism Speaks talks about Simon Baron-Cohen’s studies in England, where he shows subjects pictures of people’s eyes and asks them to identify the emotion those eyes are expressing. Paul explains why people on the autism spectrum have a hard time identifying the emotions of others. Meanwhile, co-host Chuck Nice volunteers a bit too much information about sociopaths…

This "Behind the Scenes" video was shot during the recording of our episode, "Autism and Animal Science with Dr. Temple Grandin." If you'd like to listen to the full podcast, click here: http://www.startalkradio.net/show/aut...

I do feel like this is a very common misconception. I'm a very empathetic person, sometimes to a fault, and often more than the people around me seem to be. I think I sometimes see emotional complexities in others that most people seem to miss, and I'm very good at seeing things from other points of views.

As others have been saying, it may be the social component that makes it seem that we're less empathetic, even when that's not true at all. In my case, I may sometimes feel someone's emotions so vividly or see an issue they're facing from so many points of view, that I don't know how to respond. So I might not respond at all, because I don't want to make the situation worse. Whereas someone else might react immediately to the situation, without thinking it through as deeply, and without giving as much thought to the problem or the solution. So naturally, they might seem more empathetic, just because they acted, whether or not the way they responded was the best way of doing so.

That's just how I feel, anyway. As with a lot of aspie problems, I feel like the split second delays in my thinking can sometimes make a world of difference.