Human Emotions.

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I have a severely limited understanding of human emotions. I have a restricted range of emotions myself. Is there any point in me learning about human emotions? Some people say there is, but I don't see the point as I would not be able to relate or understand properly.

What is your opinion?

It is useful to know the basics of what emotions there are and what situations involve what emotions, but it is not necessary to relate to them.

I don't think that it's possible to relate to emotions that I don't have in situations.

Ok fair enough.

I get very confused when I am in a situation with a very emotional person.

Today a resident in the supported housing I'm in was crying about something and I just walked off. I couldn't cope with the emotion she had; it was overwhelming and confusing.

I believe it is necessary to understand how another person is feeling during a given point during your closest relationships with other people. By understanding what they are going through plays a large role in developing and maintaining relationships with others.

Same situation I guess...

I have deficits in detecting and reacting from my and others emotional responses, the less dramatic and subtle responses are often missed.

It can be a good thing learning what emotion exactly someone is having and guess how they feel depending on the situation. Can be useful for maintaining friends, relationships and for the workplace.

This perhaps goes for any social situation for me... But I don't see the point nor really have the effort or energy to attend classrooms for learning this. It can be learned with observation or by self, but have deficits in learning capability.

Makes sense.

I think learning by observation is best. Although my autism support worker has suggested me attending a National Autistic Society group :/

As far as emotions go, an additional confounding factor (at least for me) is that people will project emotional states onto me in a discussion and then address those emotional states. Very confusing.

It's happened on this forum a handful of times as well.

Ugh, I hate it when people do that. It adds so much work to the discussion. First, one has to recognize that they are projecting, then one has to make the other person aware of their assumption about one's emotions, then one usually has to convince the other person that she's wrong.

I looked up a discussion I had on another forum a couple of years ago where this happened. I mention it because of where the conversation was going.

One person had read about Simon Baron-Cohen's book about "zero empathy" or "evil" and decided the quote "zero empathy is the root of all evil" was the absolute truth. He then went on to assert that people who were primarily empathizers or systemizers were not "properly human" and didn't have minds, and how systemizers were prone to evil. This considering the fact that a significant majority of autistic people test on SBC's scales as some degree of systemizers with comparatively low empathy scores.

When I objected to this I was accused of making the argument personal (as opposed to stating my personal stake in the argument being part of that group of people being characterized as evil and not properly human), and trying to create drama for the sake of creating drama.

That's one of my most egregious experiences. I remember asking my mother a question about why she did something and she said I was "imagining things" when I didn't say I thought any particular reason was the case. When she wouldn't give me a reason, I suggested a few possibilities and asked again what the reason was.

On this forum I remember a discussion that got out of hand. One participant who had been disagreeing with me posted that he accepted that I had valid reasons for my opinions. I had gone to bed shortly after answering that post, woke up and I checked the thread again, and replied to some of his responses. He claimed that we had "agreed to disagree," accused me of waiting for him to log off the forum before responding to the posts (I didn't even know how to tell if someone was online or offline at the time, and I was responding after getting out of bed), and then said I was being manipulative for these reasons. Which was odd to me because I didn't recall "agreeing to disagree" in the first place.

To me human emotions are confusing and overwhelming as well.
My disability report stated I am not capable of normal human workingplace interaction and that I need protection from the abuse(stated) that can happen from it (being in a working situation with people not familiar of autism).
I am too naive and too prone to be abused.

Emotions must be understood on the level of survival strategy. Most people have emotions -- often these are erratic, illogical and manipulative -- and, like other dangerous acts of nature, one must know enough to navigate them safely. "Relating" is optional, recreational, and best done under controlled conditions.

Empathy is always going to confuse because of the way most people on the spectrum process emotion.

It's not lack of empathy, nor is it a lack of emotion in ourselves, it is rather, that our way of processing clashes with they way NTs process.

For an NT understanding emotion and empathy are central to a successful life, more important than money and status. They process emotion and respond empathicly almost without thinking and they use it to maintain their personal relationships, their work relationships, their family peace..... and they start from birth - by 6 months old most babies are well versed in getting their needs and wants met and they do it by using emotion, though at that point they are completely egocentric and empathy hasn't developed beyond responding to someone elses upset by being upset themselves. Emotion and empathy are central to their functioning as social beings.

People on the spectrum have more of a problem with this; they do not process emotion naturally in the same way. For some they do not notice the emotion in others fast enough to process it effectively enough to respond the way others expect them to. For some it is that they cannot access the understanding of the subtleties - straight forward emotion like anger, joy, excitement, sadness, etc is ok but the nuances of bitterness, irony, etc get lost somewhere and aren't processed effectively either in themselves or others. For some emotion is overwhelming, they feel everything so intensely it is just too painful to process properly - this is largely to do with filtering issues and the ASC propensity to take in too much data. Some, especially those who have prosopagnosia and can't read emotion in a face (approx. 2% of the general population but estimated to be around 50% of the ASC population) have to build other strategies to even be able to recognise strong emotion in someone else.
And even when we have understood the emotions we are presented with and feel the empathy connected with them we often don't really know what the appropriate response should be so we don't look as if we are empathising.

However we process our emotions and those of others it takes a long time to learn to do it effectively in a way that can help NTs relate to us and it is a major barrier between NT and ASC people because neither can access how the other functions and both are making assumptions about responses that are inaccurate because the barrier distorts mutual understanding.

Unfortunately for those on the spectrum, NTs are mostly unaware of the difficulties people with ASCs have. Our problem with this is entirely invisible to them - they need to understand 2 basics to get this: a) they are interacting with a non-NT person and b) people on the spectrum process emotion differently and need to have some adjustments made by those interacting with them - neither of which can be assumed - we don't look different so they will always assume we aren't and even if they do see the difference they may not realise the source of the difference or the implications of it in social communication. NTs have just as much difficulty accessing our emotional status as we have accessing theirs.

We therefore have 2 choices:

if we want to interact effectively and enjoy social communication with NTs we have to learn some strategies to help us respond more effectively which may mean being prepared to explain ourselves or being prepared to spend some time learning how to read emotion in others and ourselves and how to appear to be empathising appropriately...

or we have to accept that they will never understand us, or us them, and restrict ourselves to our small group of social relationships with the people who do know we are different and respond accordingly - usually only our families.

Some people really want that social interaction so for them it is imperative that they are prepared to work at it, others aren't too bothered and are happy to be mostly alone in the world...the path you choose is simply the one that gives you the best outcome for you.

A rider to that though:

good social interaction is positive and affirming and is essential to most people's mental health whether ASC or NT.