Random bursts of emotion.

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I have been referred to as "vulcan" and I can relate to the character "Spock" from Star Trek. I am a very logical thinker and often clueless to other peoples emotions as I rarely have any myself. However, now while browsing the forum, I got a profound feeling of "sadness/nostalgia" and my eyes welled for a moment and it was back to neutral again. I have at times had stress build to a point of lashing out at inanimate objects, but those times the cause was clear...

I don't know what triggered this one, but it has happened before without apparent cause. Has anyone experienced this? Does anyone have a theory as to the cause?

Isn't it a common mistake of NTs to think that Aspies are emotionless? Even though you may have trained yourself to be exquisitely logical, your emotions are still there. Maybe the issue is that an Aspie doesn't always consciously connect an emotional response to the stimulus that caused it?

Generally, Aspies have emotions just like anyone else, we just have a harder time dealing with them and understanding them.

For example, I often only know what I think about something a few months after it's happened. It just randomly pops up in my head one day, months later.

Yep. Aspies don't lack emotion. Instead our emotions and our empathy are different from NT's.

I frequently feel fear and anger. I can feel joy for brief periods.

That's about it. I'm not sure that NT's really have other emotions either. I think emotion is like color. There are only a few colors, but mixing those colors results in different refractions, tints and hues. Humans, with our full color stereoscopic vision, like to name all these different mixes even when they are not very different. I think NT's are just more sensitive to "mixes" of emotions than AS are. For example, frustration could be anger with a large does of fear. To me, frustration is the same feeling I get when somebody insults me. Either way, it's a burst of "Hulk Smash!" type feeling in my head. I can't feel the fear part, the anger part comes first and largest and is the only piece of significance.

Could be a momentary chemical imbalance, or some stimulation that caused an emotional upwelling that you were only dimly aware of. Were you reading anything that might cause emotion? Was your mind cast back to some thought?

I get random bursts of emotions around the 23rd of each month that have nothing to do with PMS. I'd be posting on WP and listening to YouTube and than I'll start balling my eyes out. I hat two of them last night. One to do with mg upbringing and another to do with a death of some sort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma

... or being aware of what they even are.

Sometimes I can feel an emotional "swell" coming on, but an emotion can just as easily (as well as completely) catch me by surprise.

90% of the time (approx.) I feel nothing, this is likely due to deeply suppressing my emotions beginning at an early age. If there was a specific reason why I did this, that reason also got repressed around the same time. Following this theory one more step: Since I have been suppressing emotion since early childhood (as far back as I can remember) I never developed the ability to properly react to my own suppressed emotions or the skills to recognise them in others. This is however just a theory.

In the past, every once in a while, I used to I get this "epiphanal" feeling that drove me to tear up. It's almost like deja vu. I'm just sitting there pondering on things and all the suddenly this emotion wells up and I get the feeling of being in a film were the theme song kicks in. I remember feeling these kinds of things a lot as a kid. Not so much anymore as an adult, especially when my depression is bad.

Yes, I have had phases of these moments and it is nostalgic in 'feel' and a sadness indeed can follow. Certain things such as unsurfaced memories are triggered from say, a program on T.V. ; ruminating, or even being in someones house as there is something peculiar there that conjures this up in me ....
I can remember looking at pictures of someone else dated in 1987, and the date alone caused an association of all sorts with this.
These moments can last a while and sometimes they can be profound as they are soul gripping.

Loss? Or more accurately it maybe a Loss with a form of executive dysfunction.
I am pretty sure it is this double combination with myself. These are random and it seems to pop up from a trigger.

Over the years I've put many miles of thinking into my own peculiar existence, and at times I've experienced a lot of internal pain in my life from being different as to not knowing the whole reason why. I spent many years alone and really being unable to interface with humanity, at least as other people did,etc.

I believe the loss stems from here.^

However, since I've been aware of this board though, my thinking has been changed quite a bit, and I seem to freed from this phenomenon.....

well, i can relate to this in a sense. i do feel emotions, but somehow every emotion i feel feels like adrenalin. i can't give it another name really..... if i don't look into it at all i will say i can feel shocked, sad ( though mildly), scared ( strongly), happy ( that's rare though) but when i analise it it all feels like different doses of adrenalin, and then i analyse it in reference to context, but sometimes i can get mixed up. i can feel like i'm scared to talk to a guy and avoid him for this reason, when in fact i know the adrenalin is supposed to mean pleasure, because i like the guy. but the adrenalin being as strong as the fear dosage, i mix them up and flee. i can even get angry at the guy for making me feel so bad.
if that makes sense....

I can relate somehow, my best friend admited that she used to think I had no emotions apart from the emotions of the others (because when I was 13-14 I felt bad because of my depressed friend for an unknown reason) and still think that I don't have so many emotions compared to most people, including her, yet I have randon bursts of emotions too.

As in : when I watch a movie, I am moved by fiction more than I am by real life events, but it's mostly due to the music, music have a great impact on my mood.
Also when I am tired, I become totally weird and somewhat impulsive just as I used to when I had meltdowns.

I think it tends to happen to everyone once in their life, feeling something strong for no reasons when they tend to be less emotional usually.

Is it that Aspies have fewer emotions or that because so much energy must be spent figuring out the social environment that little is left for a broad set of emotional responses? I spend way too much time frustrated by external events that others seem to handle with ease. So my emotional range is always limited. It's not that it's missing, it's just not relevant to the things at hand.

I get a burst of a different emotion with each song that I listen to. It kind of makes me feel high, after a day filled with a variety of music off of YouTube.