Have you ever been told you have empathy?

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Today I was seeing my shrink and we were talking and I was telling her I wonder how would a baby feel when they get older if he or she found out the reason why they exist on this planet is because their mother was raped, I don't know if they be hurt or upset and I wouldn't want my child to go through that if I were raped. The child could be shunned too because their mother was raped so that's how they were born and it wouldn't be fair to them, even illegitimate kids were shunned because their parents had sex and they weren't even married so they were shunned for it and treated bad and it's not fair to them because it's not their fault. Then my shrink told me what I am doing is having empathy because I am thinking how they might feel and how the person might feel when they get pregnant from rape and I can show it. And I have been told I lack it or I don't show it and she told me they don't know me in real life so they wouldn't know. My last boyfriend told me I didn't have it or show it and we were together 24/7 for a month.

Did you get your last BF to take an empathy test... that’s something to think about. Man that's allot of time together in a month... or that just going a bit overboard

No I didn't. I didn't even know there was one or I would have told him to take it too. I knew my bf for nearly two months before I moved in with him.

The Empathy Quotient test is its name, it's written by Baron-Cohen, the Asperger's dude.

I would say I am empathetic in a different way than most people. If someone tells me they broke up with their bf/gf, I'll say "eh, so what? You'll get over it." But if I see someone who is obviously in anguish, mental or physical, it's really hard for me not to feel for them.

I tend to have more sympathy towards non-human animals, too. There's not a huge difference, though.

I think it's a myth that we are not empathetic at all.

I have no empathy at all. I know I don't, and the EQ test proves it (I get 2 on it). They say those with AS/HFA get 20, it's 42-47 for "normal" people.

I score low on it. Just because I don't pick up cues very well or can't read non verbal cues very well or have troubles empathizing with people doesn't mean I don't have it.


Yeah have taken the quiz, I forgotten all about it. I always score lower than 20.

I got a single-digit score, too, but I still think I have empathy.

I've always thought that the autistic "lack of empathy" has more to do with the fact that we'd act differently in many situations to most people, and we base our ideas from that.

Most autistic people can understand responses about the big things, like rape - it's a stereotype that we can't...

A lot of people don't completely understand the concept of empathy.

I like to use the example of watching human suffering that you haven't personally experienced; if you feel nothing, or not much at all, it generally points to a lack of empathy. Now, if you witness something that's very close to something you have experienced, you then understand the pain the individual/s are going through as you've felt it before; this is sympathy.

We have sympathy; most of us don't have much empathy.

That's a good point. I still think I have empathy, though, but a different kind.

(I just took the EQ test and I got 8. I think I got 3 or 4 the last time.)

My mother told me a month of so ago that I can't possibly be an aspie because I'm the most compassionate person she knows. Whilst hearing it did give me the warm fuzzies inside, it did get me thinking. I believe that as with everything else aspie-related, it's a spectrum.

There are two components to empathy as experienced by other people. There is the internal feeling of empathy, and there is the communicating the empathetic feelings with others. By the very nature of aspergers, an aspie is going to suck at the second part, even if they are very good at the first.

At one end of the spectrum, you have aspies who cannot empathise with another person at all. They just can't understand the idea of another person having legitimate emotions. I suppose this would be the Theory of Mind waffle that's so popular.

At the other end, you have aspies who feel empathy with others strongly, but due to their aspie nature, they have extreme difficulty with communicating that empathy with other people. They might empathise strongly with whatever pain someone else is going through, but if they lack the social skills to 'read' what is needed in the situation, they're going to do or say something inappropriate, and others will come to the false conclusion they lack empathy. After all, empathy is the condition of feeling what someone else is feeling, and treating them the way you would like to be treated in the same situation.

An aspie who would like to be left alone to deal with things and hates to be touched is going to provide someone else that same emotional distance if they see the other person is upset. But the NT will interpret that distance as lack of empathy and be offended, because what makes the aspie feel better is not what makes the NT feel better.

I think I have empathy - I have been told that I am compassionate - but I also think that I can 'turn it off' at need, and sometimes it's just not on. This can actually be quite useful in some situations; I work in a hospital, and if someone comes into the emergency room who's in extreme pain it doesn't do any good at all to empathise with them. One has to be able to act without feeling - sometimes the physical actions taken by health care workers, especially in emergency situations (cutting a hole in the side of someone's chest to relieve the pressure of internal bleeding, for instance, has to be done as soon as the need is seen, without anesthesia, because the person's lung(s) might collapse otherwise) are quite painful. If you're worried about hurting the person, you're more likely to hesitate and hurt them even worse.

On the other hand, it can be quite painful for NT patients (who are not in so much pain that they aren't aware of anyone else) to recognize that you simply do not care how they feel. Or other people, I suppose. I have to pretend with my mother quite a bit that I care more than I do - which is ironic: I pretend that I care about small things, because I care about how she would feel if she recognized that I didn't care.

I generally find it easier to be compassionate towards animals than towards humans.

talitha_kumi said

You took the words right out of my mouth.

Some aspies have no empathy
Some aspies have sympathy
Some aspies can pretend to have empathy
Some aspies can have some empathy when the problem is shoved in their faces...

I'm yet to see an aspie who can be empathetic in direct response to observed minor hurt.

I took that test out of curiosity, and scored all of 9. No wonder I generally don't get interviews on those damned job applications with a personality test, even when I fudge my answers slightly towards what I think they want to hear.

I did already know that for the most part I really do fake most of my emotion in regards to other people. I was never too shaken up when I heard my friend's dad died(Fell and hit his head in the mountains while trying to get to and see if his house was still standing after being evacuated for fires), or my friend's brother got shot in the head(He survived and is pretty much fine though, but they didn't expect him to recover at the time and/or end up physically disabled), or yet another friend of mine whose girlfriend died last year(Epilepsy). Ive never cried while watching a movie and always thought it was weird that anyone does knowing from the start that its not real. I can identify when things should make me sad or such, they just don't usually affect me much. For the most part the only thing that really crosses my mind in situations like that are 'Sucks for them', and Ive never been one to try and comfort people in such a situation.

I read they is 2 things to empathy,

Empathy has at least two components: a cognitive component involving the ability to attribute mental states to others, and an affective component involving an appropriate emotional response to another person's mental state. The cognitive component overlaps with what is sometimes called using a 'theory of mind', or 'mindreading'. We are investigating both components, in individuals with autism spectrum conditions as well as in the general population. We are using a range of methods, from questionnaires (such as the Empathy Quotient (EQ)), cognitive tests assessing emotion recognition (using stimuli from the Mindreading DVD), galvanic skin response (GSR) studies and gaze-tracking of facial expressions of emotion. Empathy is being tested in toddlers right through to adults, with age-appropriate methods. This project links closely with our fMRI studies so that we can also examine the neural basis of empathy, and our genetic studies, so that we can understand the possible functional significance of genetic associations that are discovered.