Do you think people with autism experience emotions diff...

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Do you think people with autism experience emotions differently than other people? And if so, how?

Absolutely I think we do. I honestly can't speak for everyone and I also am not sure exactly how it's different because I've never experienced emotions as an NT. I know for certain that what I experience and how is not at all the same in comparison to the people around me.

Like how the rest of my senses can be hypo or hyperreactive to things so can my emotions. I don't always feel the appropriate amount of happy or sad in response to the trigger. I might feel nothing at all or be borderline euphoric. It depends. On what? I'm not sure. Whatever state my brain decides to be in at that moment I guess.

I also know that I think through every single one of my emotions and whether it's logical or acceptable or not. As a result I sometimes feel the emotional profile of at least several different perspectives I could take on that given situation which leaves me feeling about 1000 emotions at a single moment in time which can be overwhelming. It is also confusing because I have to distinguish between them all which emotions are from my perspective and then is that perspective reasonable/the that I want to take and is it the one I want to keep. At the same time, this doesn't make any of those other feelings go away, I just focus on a different set more so they fade in the background.

I also don't feel angry very often but when I do it's more like an intense rage and despair of injustice and inequality like typical angsty teen years level but I've always had it and it never went away either. Also, they're in response to valid things not stupid things, I'm just taking intensity wise.

I think sometimes that the main difference is that consciously Im partly separated from my emotions because I apply so much logic and reasoning before after and while I'm feeling them that it's like they're just something that's happening to me but they aren't actually mine. I can separate them from affecting my thoughts and actions at a success rate better than any human I've encountered and the ability is more inhuman than human I think.

I also think there are a lot of really strong defining emotions that we have that NT"S don't experience on a day to day. Because they don't there aren't names for them which contributes to our inability to communicate our experiences. I think a lot of us feel daily an intense feeling of wrong and right that dictates what actions we take. We don't get sad and then act or get mad and then act, we feel something is wrong or something is right and then act.

I don't know it's a hard question to answer. There's a lot of complexities to it.

I used to think so but I've since learned the reason it seems like autistic people experience emotions differently is because we've had different life experiences. Many of us were treated poorly in the past and felt ashamed or rejected for being different or being ourselves. I learned that because of something called classical conditioning (see Little Albert experiment), it can cause us to associate criticism, being ourselves, and being different with painful emotions which can cause us to experiences more anxiety, be more sensitive, and experience more intense and unwanted emotions.

Gradual exposure therapy, which involves gradually being yourself and seeking out gradually increasing levels of criticism when you're stress level is low and you're thinking positively, helped me get rid of most of my unwanted emotions. I went from being highly sensitive, easily offended, and getting upset easily to not being bothered by criticism at all. I used to mask my differences. Now I just be myself and people like me more than they ever did because I don't have emotional problems anymore. If you want to read more about it, what I did is explained here - https://autismcbt.wordpress.com/sensiti ... criticism/

I don't know. I know I have emotions that other describe having, but whether I experience them differently is unknown. I also know my responses are different to different things, but I am not sure what that means.

My wife and I once received a letter accusing us of being fascists in one paragraph, and communists in another. I felt that this was self-cancelling, and did not react. My NT ex, OTOH, reacted strongly to both terms.
Along with the usual male suppression of emotions, I had no exposure to other people showing emotion at home. That would have made noise that my AS mother didn't like. It took me a very long time to learn to recognize my emotions and deal with them when they finally arose regularly.

Depends on what you mean by "experience."

I think autistic people tend to have emotional reactions to situations that non-autistic people don't care about.

I think autistic people are more likely to experience certain kinds of emotionally provoking situations than non-autistic people (such as being misunderstood, left out, exploited, infantilized, etc.).

I think some autistic people have unusual difficulty recognizing their emotions because they lack the interoception necessary to sense elevated heart beat, sudden increase in bodily temperature, and other physiological manifestations of emotion as strongly or as reliably as non-autistic people sense them.

I suspect that autistic people might be more confused about, secretive about, and unable to identify certain emotions due to being less likely than non-autistic people to experience others mirroring and understanding their emotions.

I suspect that autistic people might have more difficulty managing emotions due to never having been taught how to properly deal with emotionally provocative situations because the non-autistic people around them rarely or never experience those situations.

Personally I've had a difficult time finding information about dealing with emotional issues related to repetitive thoughts (which I assume has something to do with autism), presumably because it's not much of an issue for non-autistic people. I've researched rumination and OCD and one or two other things, and nothing has been very relevant.

It seems every autistic person reacts to emotion differently and on top of that good portion of autistic people experience alexithymia. (Some studies say up to 85%) Alexithymia makes you by defintion experience emotion differently. On top of that it seems some autistic people are muted to emotion and react less strongly to it and some are hypersensitive to it. There's also the fact that some autistic people react to emotions different. I.E. laughing when in pain or uncomfortable. I personally do that.