Double-Standards: The Irony of Empathy and Autism

Post Reply New Topic

I think that was a brilliant post.
I know I don't express emotions well, mostly because I don't know how, it doesn't come naturally to me. But there are some things that cannot be expressed.
The worst pain is when people accept you for who they think you are, but don't really know you and cannot see or accept who you really are.

Yes. Absolutely.

Brilliant!

This same part stood out to me as well.
The two terms describe only differences in the end of the processing of the feeling of empathy.
I think the empathy and emotional feeling is the same in both cases.

Where the significant difference comes in is in the stage where the feeling gets translated into a need to behave in certain ways outwardly, - the part that gets observed by others. The emoting.

It is quite clear that the emoting itself is a calculated and often deceptive, but expected tool to be used in social interactions. Children learn the expectations and the behaviors, which then become conditioned within them such that it feels like the most natural thing to do. NT children are able to quickly learn this intuitively.

The result is that the better actor you've learned to become, the more people are convinced that you are experiencing a particular emotion.
Another result is that the emoting provides a feedback that facilitates the process of emotional manipulation by others. The intricate games of emotional manipulation would be far more difficult if people were not conditioned to emote in ways that were easy to recognize from the outside.

The same process happens in other primates, and for the same reason.
Emotional manipulation is a very simple but effective way to communicate for various purposes such as cooperation, defense, intimidation, dominance, etc...
The process lends itself perfectly to establishing hierarchies as well.

This thread displays in a bizarre manner. Why do all the posts on the first page thread display as one this column?

An incredibly relevant and thought-provoking article. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. I think I'll show this to my mother. Hopefully it will help her understand me a little better.

Your feminist review of Sucker Punch is also interesting, even though I never saw the movie because I dislike Zack Snyder's "style," for lack of a better word, with a passion. CGI everywhere, everything's too loud, lots of people die/things blow up real good, forehead-smacking musical cues--all the stuff that drove me nuts in Watchmen is common in his other films. But thanks to your thoughtful observations, I will allow for the possibility that Sucker Punch had something important to say about women and society.

Nice article.

The formatting started messing up after Samian's post where they quoted me. I think there's a broken tag or something in the quote, but since I didn't make that reply, so I can't fix it. If Samian is reading this, do you know how to fix it?

Thanks for pointing that out. I fixed it. I think I was mixing up other studies that imply autists can empathize, but it's only through thinking about it really hard, imagining being in the other person's shoes rather than feeling it. I think I conflated both concepts. Rather than go back and re-research where I found that and what it's called, I just changed up the words to be accurate to the studies I ended up referencing on accident hehe.

Ganondox is referring to the definition of empathy from Simon Baron-Cohen,
which is not at all the majority view of what empathy is.

He read some popular articles about theory of mind/empathy systemize theory (and the extreme male brain theory), and that is possible why he reference to this kind of definition of affective and cognitive empathy (cognitive empathy is theory of mind).

But I have no respect for his views (Prof. S. Baron-Cohen), because he lacks in logical reasoning.

The truth is, their are as many theories about empathy as that their are researchers in the field.
This is a good start. http://cultureofempathy.com/references/definitions.htm

The reason why the cognitive empathy theory (= ToM) fails is, because it try to explain why people with autism can't take (or have more problems) in taking perspective of other individuals, but in reality both (neurotypical and aspergians) have trouble in taking perspective of the other type of person. People with asperger and neurotypical individuals both fail in taking the perspective of eachother. This is one possible reason why people with asperger can make easier freinds with eachother, because they can easier understand eachother persepctive and general thinking.

But if you want to have a more scientific discussions about empathy, I would like to suggest you to not ask information to people in this forum, many people here are uninformed.


Engineering Biology.