The empathy question - once more.

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Usage - From the Oxford Dictionary Empathy vs. Sympathy

People often confuse the words empathy and sympathy. Empathy means ?the ability to understand and share the feelings of another? (as in ?both authors have the skill to make you feel empathy with their heroines?), whereas sympathy means ?feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else?s misfortune? (as in ?they had great sympathy for the flood victims?).

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defin ... sh/empathy

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Personally I thought empathy would be the one area where I would not fit the common Aspie/Autistic profile - But when taking this exam:

http://aspietests.org/eq/index.php

I ended up with this result:

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Test taken by you on 22 July 2014 21.0

The average score for males with ASD (132 people took this test) 23.4
The average score for females with ASD (144 people took this test) 21.9
The average score for males with suspected ASD (914 people took this test) 20.0
The average score for females with suspected ASD (1497 people took this test) 23.8
The average score for male neurotypicals (389 people took this test) 36.2
The average score for female neurotypicals (607 people took this test) 42.4

-- So I see according to this test that I am less empathetic than the average male with ASD. I thought to myself, "how can this be?" I donate to charities. I have personally sacrificed so unfortunate people could have a little more. Hell, I vote Democratic. How can I not be empathetic? I suppose it should be noted that a person can be compassionate, sympathetic and quite willing to help others - but not necessarily very empathetic which requires an ability to spontaneously and intuitively understand what and how someone else is thinking and feeling.

The complex information processing hypothesis makes little sense to me.
It contradicts most data from studies by researchers who don't already think that autism is a disorder of complex information processing.

"an ability to spontaneously and intuitively understand what and how someone else is thinking and feeling."

Well if that's what empathy is, then yes, I don't have it. But I feel compassion, I guess that is going
to have to be enough. People seem to think that if you don't have empathy you can't have anything
and must be some kind of monster

But wait......if an NT does not spontaneously and intuitively understand me, does that mean they
don't have empathy? No, it means I am too strange.

Heads I win, tails you lose

I think of empathy as imaging you are that person. "walk a day in their shoes" and respond to them in that way. I see an employee annoyed at the cash register and my immediate reaction is to respond negatively to them. But if I imagine what may be causing them to act that way (they are having a bad day like many I have had) then I can relate and maybe I will smile and say thank you instead. They may just need a smile from someone to take a deep breath and move on. I give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not just a jerk.

The ability to implicitly understand spontaneously, intuitively, and quickly what someone else is thinking during interaction is social cognition, which is lacking in autism. This implicit understanding is not like neurotypicals are stating in their heads, "Person A is thinking this, and Person B is feeling that". That is what autistics might do if they had trained themselves to read people. Neurotypicals just have the social behavioral responses that indicate that they implicitly understand without having the understanding be a conscious process. For complex social situations, neurotypicals also have to think about what the other people are thinking.

Just because you have trouble telling when someone is upset, doesn't mean you don't care. As long as you care when you KNOW someone is upset, that is the important thing. If you want to learn to pick up signals better, try reading up on body language.