Unemotionals

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When I walk into a room full of people I don't feel people's emotions intensely but I am intensely aware that I don't know what they are feeling and I am alienated and everyone seems strange and I don't know how to act or get along with people.

The root of the word feeling is to be conscious of a sensation. A feeling is something felt. Thus I’d say you all have feelings of some sort. Emotion on the other hand is etymologically linked to the verb move. And truly as movement I perceive emotions. They are not separable entities like love, hate or happiness each glued to certain people, things or events, but rather a constant movement - flow in which I perceive myself and my relation to all.

Conceptualization has fragmented our perception in such way that instead of feeling this constant inseparable flow of being, we perceive concepts we learned to name. I can’t tell what I feel, for a feeling exists only as something I feel. Right now I am listening to music, stimming in between and feeling like… well, like you do in a magic kingdom of magic. There are no words for it in the conceptual catalogue of words.

I personally think I feel this aforedescribed emotional flow very intensely, but I probably have less “social emotions”. For example when I hear people talking about “romantic love” it sounds like something I’ve never felt. Also things like grouping and alliances, sensing power and position require certain social emotions, that I at least in intensity miss.

In the intense world theory you mentioned, btbnnyr, I think they postulated that hyper-emotionality in autism could be linked to hyper-functionality in amygdala and/or other emotion related brain areas. They also hypothesized the diversity within the spectrum as the result of different brain areas being exposed.

I have emotions, just much fewer than most people around me. My mother didn't know why I didn't appear to have emotions in childhood, and she calls me No Reaction. I don't really understand statements like "I'm upset" in response to event in daily life, so while I have emotions that I can feel, I don't have or feel them as often as others, who seem very connected to their emotions at all times. I should add that I rarely feel hungry or thirsty either, so perhaps that is related to this too.

Many emotions are foreign to me, such as the "rush of joy" people experience when viewing a sunset, or the spontaneous shiver someone might feel when another person relates their personal experience. I have no passion and cannot get excited about anything. Yet, I can feel the full spectrum of negative emotion.

I've been told I'm overly emotional, and I can run a little extreme sometimes (hot headed). I have a hard time with identifying complex emotions, but they're there. I felt guilty when my grandfather died, and I just felt blank at the news. I cried at his funeral, but still felt separate from it.

So the name for that is flattened/blunted affect (compared to NTs) and it's really common for schizoids, schizophrenics and autistics. There's a difference between those not having emotions and those who have emotions and don't show them (in the same way as NTs) but they don't have different names for some inexplicable reason. The name is too simplistic as it calling several things that might present externally similar for one name and offering the same solution and explanation for all and not caring whether it's healthy or unhealthy in the name of making everyone "normal"...
So with that disclaimer; this info might help some:

I think I was born hypoemotional and hyposensitive to social stimuli. This is probably why unlike many other autistic people, I don't feel uncomfortable when I am looking at people's eyes. I don't feel anything like other people describe, like lasers from eyes or invasive eye contact or bad feelings during eye contact. The reason why I don't make NT eye contact is because eyes are only a small part of the possibility space of things my eyes could look at, so in the absence of the attraction to the eyes like NTs have (I call this the social field like electric field), my looking is more spread out over many things in addition to eyes.