Affective vs. Cognitive Empathy

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I think this makes a lot of sense. I feel that I am more affected by other people's troubles than NT's are.

All research on this claims that aspies have higher affective empathy but lower cognitive empathy.

I guess we've worked so hard at constructing systems and analysis to give us a method to work out what other people are thinking, what is appropriate to say etc - and we've set the volume on Max as we try to somehow navigate the NT social world.
As a result we get distressed a lot, get very sensitive to others disapproval - because we are trying so hard to recognise it, we have no filters.

I think it's different with every aspie. I can feel empathy but I'll admit it's lower than most peoples. It also depends what kind of situation and the people I'm around. To be honest I usually feel more empathy for animals than humans.

Okay, so I don't know how to explain affective or cognitive empathy. Because I'm not sure what I have. See I have empathy for fictional characters like in a book or in a RPG. But in the real world I feel nothing for someone whom broke their leg. Or I am really bad at this, but this is an example. My best friend broke his metatarsal one day. But I had simply believed him to have sprained his ankle. He was telling me how much it hurts and I told him to get over it, everyone sprains their ankle. There are other times. Such as my biological mother broke her arm or something. All I know is that I felt nothing and didn't feel her pain.

But when it comes to either fictional characters or animals I feel empathy with them.

Cambridge University and the Autism research centre are running a test which covers this. They show a series of pictures and ask if you sympathize with them (cognitive empathy) then later they show the same pictures and ask how they affect you (affective empathy). They don't currently tell you how you scored though my affective empathy was pretty much nonexistent. In many cases I answered higher then I felt because I thought I should feel more than I did.

I contacted ARC and suggested they show the scores for the tests and received an email back from Simon Baron-Cohen saying they would look into it. If you want to take the test you can register with them as a volunteer here. They will give you a whole bunch of tests, including this one.

I've talked about this in real life before. Rather than trying to differentiate between types of empathy, I referred to the concepts as sympathy (for affective empathy) and empathy (for cognitive empathy). I pointed out that the ability to care about the emotions of others is independent of the ability to understand them.

I think people need to be careful about their choice of wording when describing that symptom. While technically true (by one definition of the word, at least), saying that people with ASDs lack empathy will give most people an incorrect impression.

So you don't have affective empathy. I think the terms are frequenty misused and 'empathy' is largely BS but also I think you're confused on this.

Well, I said I didn't have much affective empathy so why am I confused?

Oh, okay. I queried your definition of cognitive empathy as sympathy rather than the ability for sympathy.