Simon Baron-Cohen: Aspergers Less Empathetic than Psycopaths

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Edit* You've already linked the paper.

Personally I find it hard to read people, so for me my affective empathy is poor.

Last edited by Acedia on 12 Mar 2014, 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

A post from my blog which deals with the PHYSICAL REALITY of emotion and empathy.

I want to go ahead today and add a response I posted on an Asperger website after another poster quoted from "The Simpsons." The idea in the quote relates to the Asperger / Social Majority conflict over emotion and a possible explanation for the misunderstanding.

Homer Simpson to Marge: "You don't appear to be in any kind of physical pain, the only type of pain a man understands".

I am female, but I am unable to tell the difference between physical and emotional pain. There are times I've gone to a medical doctor, because I really can't figure out if I'm sick or upset. This led me to read about how the brain processes pain and "feels" emotions. Guess what? There is only one circuit for both - emotional pain is physical. How could it be otherwise unless you believe that emotions are supernatural, which I'm sure many social people believe.

Only four emotions exist: the flight or fight response of aggression and fear; disgust, and pleasure. From my own experience, I suspect that Asperger individuals experience a default "neutral" state. Social children LEARN to diffuse and differentiate their basic pain responses and to give those new states names - it's a fundamental task of social training. This is especially true for females. Inflating and dispersing pain via hundreds of descriptive words serves to keep females confused, distracted from anger and fear, and obsessed with subtle differences and changes in social emotions. This socialization of pain keeps women powerless. Society teaches females to imagine that real physical responses are thousands of subtle and entangled emotions that don't really exist!

What I am suggesting is that Aspies experience basic physiological pain, not the "emotions" social children learn. Also that we have a neutral setting, which is our default setting. This benign state produces our familiar "blank reaction" when people say something unimportant or baffling. We just don't feel emotion/pain unless something in the environment triggers the fight or flight response, or pleasure or disgust. Social people interpret our neutral setting as offensive; after all, to them, everything they say or do, and the reaction they get from people, is vital to the continuing existence of the universe. Social people assume that we don't care about human beings because we're not in their frantic (to us) emotional mode 24/7. Emotion for us isn't this fantastical overwhelming supernatural state that colors and controls the fate of mankind. For us it is pain or the absence of pain - and our response is most often flight.

I think this also may explain why Asperger individuals commonly suffer from anxiety. From the time we are young, social situations are painful for us because we are rejected and treated badly. We are different, and social people react very negatively to that fact. Diversity is not really a social value.

No worries, Acedia -- I was hoping to be more clear, but the research on the dual aspects of empathy is fairly new. Also, i think like all things concerning autism, it's up to each of us to figure out where we're at -- or not, if a person doesn't wanna. Suffice it to say, I'm at a place where I reject the idea that I neither have emotions nor register others' (I have affective empathy) while I wholeheartedly accept the idea that I do not understand what those emotions are about (low cognitive empathy). Toward this end, I think we could use an updated EQ test, one that reflects both affective empathy and cognitive empathy.

Meanwhile, gonewild, I love the part where you say, "unless you believe that emotions are supernatural, which I'm sure many social people believe." I'm pretty sure you meant it humorously, and I laughed out loud! Hahahahaha!

Nuerotypicals have no empathy towards autistics.

Good one!

true

I doubt that neurotypicals have empathy for other neurotypicals. It's all me, me, me!

I have way too much affective empathy. I wish I had less.

I also want to know where this LaLaLand of empathetic, abstract/big-picture thinking neurotypicals that the autism researchers seem to live in is SO I CAN MOVE THERE and get less crap for my empathy and abstract/big-picture thinking.

Hello 'Nick' - Where are all those fabulous kind and caring, rational, intelligent, mature neurotypicals? They don't exist. I talk a lot about NT arrogance on my blog.

http://www.aspiemanifesto.blogspot.com

I guess the ones I know personally are a figment of my imagination, then.

You sure you're not suffering from confirmation bias?

C'mon Who Am I! I was responding to a comment. It's sarcasm. I get sarcasm, don't you???

a lot of us don't get sarcasm in a manner you might wish we got. the closer it is to swift, the further it is from common understanding on this forum.

There's a lot of people here who would have posted what you did in agreement to the comment you were responding to.

"There's a lot of people here who would have posted what you did in agreement to the comment you were responding to."

This sentence makes no sense.

Last edited by gonewild on 01 Apr 2014, 10:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I can learn to ape it but like teaching a pig how to apply lipstick, it doesn't always become me, rather it is like that scene from "star trek IV" where spock attempts to swear only to have kirk tell him he just doesn't have the feel for it.

Oh, of course. Spock.