Define "Empathy"

Post Reply New Topic

A common definition of empathy is the capability to share and understand another's emotions and feelings.

AS is often said to cause a empathy deficit.
According to this definition of empathy, it would be relatively true for me, as I find it difficult to 'guess' other people's feelings.

On the other hand, NTs are often said to have a higher capacity for empathy.
According to this definition again, that would mean that they are intuitively able to 'sense' other people's emotions, be they NTs or AS.

In my experience however, NTs cannot sense exceedingly well my actual emotional state, because I communicate it differently.


However, according to Wikipedia, we also have another definition: 'Empathy is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes"'.

This makes more sense to me, and could basically imply that NTs and AS have exactly the same degree of empathy.

NT being the majority, when an NT "puts himself if the shoes of the other person", it has a better chance to work than if a person with AS "puts himself if the shoes of the other person", because the other person has a higher likelihood of being NT.

To summarize:
- NTs empathise with NTs
- NTs do not empathise with AS people
- AS people do not empathise with NTs
- AS people empathise with AS people

I know that I do make a lot of intellectual efforts to understand how other people react, but often try to work this out through the prism of my own internal behavior, i.e. I imagine how I would react if I were in there shoes, knowing what they know, and with their past experiences.

Do NTs really do anything different ? Isn't the "theory of mind" just working better for them because they are the norm?

Sense by non-verbal expression. That bit is given, seeing how more than 99% of people can do it and how understanding emotions always requires the expression of emotions. That bit is pre required, unless one wants to imagine that the whole thing is magical in some weird way.

Many normal people report they feel someone is angry but cannot explain how they know, as their processing of facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures is automatic and happens before these non-verbal information can reach their conciousness.

Autistic people usually - exceptions possible - have the non-verbal expressions or send mixed signals that do not make sense as they do not fit together and fit together with what's said and done which makes it very hard to figure out how that autistic person feels for someone who picks up on most of these signals.



I experienced that the more empathy a normal person has, the easier they could identify my emotional state. There are not that many people with extreme degrees of empathy, but the few I met seem to read autistic people who show next to no expression of their emotions quite well.



I really cannot correctly estimate body language or other non-verbal expressions of emotions of autistic people, because I cannot read most non-verbal signals being autistic myself. There also seem to be some people - as they report so too - who can read others on the spectrum better than they can read normal people.

I believe that's quite possible seeing how autism can present very differently and seeing how there's no reason to believe that all AS was caused the same.



I'm not sure. Wikipedia has a short and lacking, but quite nice explanation on what many scientists consider steps of the development of empathy. And these developmental steps are usually deficient, absent or delayed in autistic people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#The_development_of_empathy

If they're not delayed, maybe then an autistic person is perfectly able of all these things? Though a delay of these are criteria for classical autism and some for AS. So maybe there is a whole new dimension to 'growing out of autism' or just growing out of delays for some though not for all people on the spectrum I guess.

Last edited by Sora on 08 Aug 2009, 9:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

Innately feeling the emotion of someone you're looking at who is experiencing emotion from something that you yourself haven't experienced. For example, a mother of a baby that you don't know is on the news crying because her child was raped and murdered, and you instantly feel an emotional reaction to this, similar to what most people would.

If you feel like everyone else, you have empathy. If you are numb to this, no empathy. Now, if the same thing happened to your child, you'd know exactly what it feels like, and this is sympathy ("we" don't lack sympathy).

(Yes, I chose my words carefully to illicit an empathetic response in people.)

Giving a damn about someone other than yourself - basically.

My feeling is that we're often confused and misled by the diagnostic criteria into believing generalizations even about ourselves within this, our own community. Personally, I'm convinced the 'lack of empathy' is merely a developmental delay in very young Aspies. By - and certainly beyond - adolescence most of us have developed what seem to be pretty much normal levels of empathetic capability. I see posts here that indicate some may go far beyond that age without it, but most seem to have grown into it by late teens.

(I will admit though, while I'm capable of being quite moved by another's plight, I'm equally capable of simply not giving a rat's patoot. It depends greatly on whether I judge the situation to be worthy of my emotional response)

Just as the inability to read non-verbal signals may be acute in young Aspergians - and still extant to some extent in adults - by the time you reach thirty, you develop a reasonable ability to pick up on what's going on around you, out of sheer paranoia at having been duped and taken by surprise so many times. I'm not good at it even now, but my radar is always on high. Which, of course, contributes to the anxiety, depression and mental fatigue associated with socializing.

Empathy isn't mentioned in the diagnostic criteria, nor under the description of AS from the same book.

It's from Hans Asperger himself (lacking empathy comes straight from him, well, from his patients, really), which went on to various other researchers as they found the same things he did in their patients, up until now with Wing, Cohen, Gillberg, et al. These latter individuals don't tow the line either, as they question, change and add many things to Asperger's account.

I'm assuming you've read my posts in your other thread where I hit this. I agree with you totally that NT's can't empathize with AS in the same way AS can't with NTs.

I think there's a lot of diagnostic criteria that's off because of NTs not being able to understand AS fully. One thing, we all have imaginative play growing up, but we do it a little different. I was just talking about this in another thread. When I played pretend, I used props. They weren't exact, but to me, it made more sense than just having invisible stuff. But that doesn't mean I lacked imagination because I couldn't understand other people's imagination or the point of it. I think empathy works the same way. I'm sure they didn't test Aspies empathizing with Aspies in their tests. In fact, they don't really test people with people as much as people with images on tv and stuff. Someone once posted a good video on the subject of empathy (and if I can find it, I'll come back and post a link). But it showed that people with autism's brain worked differently in different experiments than people who didn't have autism, and the experiments were designed to try to re-create empathy. I do think we have a hard time taking things in 2-D as seriously as things in front of us whereas I guess it's normal for someone to see 2D as real. To me, reality tv is as real as cartoons, but not to everyone else. That's why I totally don't understand how violence on tv can affect people. Now that I have kids, I sometimes make connections to the kids and can't watch certain things on tv because it affects me so much (empathy I guess in some definition).

But they don't feel the feeling of the other person, really. In your example, the emotional reaction a person would get to see said mother in the news, wouldn't be exactly the same as the mother's emotion; they wouldn't get the exact amount of grief (and fortunately so).

One would get sad; but one would not feel the mother's emotion. Only she can do that.

Or maybe I just take it too literally.

Sad is an emotion. But I can tell you now that "normal" people do feel something more than...a little sad, not the same as what the mother would feel, no, but it's intense.

As for me, I just draw a blank mind to it; no positive or negative emotions at all. No empathy.

So you mean, "feeling the same emotion" does not mean "feeling it to the same degree", but just feeling the same emotion, eg. sad, to a degree?

Then it makes sense to me... I've always thought people expected it to be of the same degree when they said that.

Although one doesn't feel anything, one can cognitively understand that this must be horrible to said mother. A kind of cognitive empathy, we could say.

I don't know how intense NTs feel situations like that. But I also know that not every (NT) person would have an intense feeling of sorrow, partly because people see so much of this kind on TV every day.

To have cognitive empathy and act on it (if possible) is better than feeling a lot of empathetic feelings and not acting on them, IMO.

without regard to other posts i will say what i see "empathy" as.

it is like a fusion between the root of the word "emulation", and "pathy" is derived from "path".

so "emulation" of "path" is what "empathy" is to me.

i believe there are certain nerve types in a persons nervous system that can be influenced by the excitation of nerves in another person's nervous expression (all expression is nervous).

they are excited not by magical influence, but by observation and identification and then
internalization.

i believe that i do not have these "window" nerves in an operational state.
i have seen them described as "mirror neurons".

they are elements of the nervous system that are symbiotic with other people.
with "empathy" you "feel" another persons plight as if it were your own plight (to varying degrees (depending on the degree of empathy)).

i have compassion but not empathy. i dislike very much to see someone suffering, and i will try to help their suffering stop.

but i do not feel personally involved or subjectively embroiled in their suffering. what is happening to them is not happening to me.
i can go to sleep without any melancholic feeling after i have left the company of someone who is having a hard time.


some simple measures of crude empathy are whether you yawn when other people do, or whether you laugh in response to other people's hysterical laughter if you do not know what they are laughing about. they are simple measures

other more serious measures may be like what you feel when watching someone jumping from a burning building (like the world trade centers) who has no hope of survival.

i do not feel anything when i am watching a doomed person approaching their doom.
if i could help them i would, but it is out of my hands.

but i do believe that no one deserves to have such a horrible experience as they had.

i can not emulate a path that winds through lands that are mysterious to me.
i do not think i could "emulate" anything.

Yep. A psycho at Attwood's told me the same thing; she likes to use "delayed empathy" rather than "lacking empathy", in that we can eventually figure it out with intelligence, it's just not innate and instant.

Of course, if you're focusing so much on your own special interest, you might not bother to work out situations that don't concern such.

I think it's important to keep in mind that "we" are all different and that "our" ability or inability to empathize is a variable and not a constant. Many of "us" over-empathize and shut down or tune out to what's going on around "us" which makes it appear that we are cold and uncaring in regard to the suffering of others. One can only speak for one's self on these matters. There is no way for another to measure my degree of empathy and vice versa. We are not a basket of eggs, a can of peas, etc.

It's most likely that people who feel too much empathy are just shutting down due to being unable to cognitively process it all, rather than actually truly feeling it innately.

If you have a person who doesn't care about what's going on around him or her, he or she won't bother trying to figure it all out. Whereas a person more in tune with the people around them will attempt to process it all (including nonverbal language), which will lead to withdrawing because the brain isn't meant to process it this way.

I cannot find the thread where I took part in the conversation on the video at all. I would swear I imagined it or they deleted it now. I even looked at all my previous posts, someone else's previous posts that I remember talking to in the thread, and did many different google searches for it. But at least I found the video on mirror neurons and empathy...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html

No, the path part means "feeling"