Excellent study shows Aspies have more empathy

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See below an excellent article showing that most Aspies in fact have more empathy than the rest, and are at times overwhelmed by feelings of empathy for those around them, including animals.

I also know from personal experience that we tend to assume others automatically feel the same way about something than I do.





https://seventhvoice.wordpress.com/2013 ... -too-much/

Yes, I always thought that I couldn't have ASD because I have so much empathy. I have very much empathy for animals and for people close to me. Two examples I can remember:

As a very young kid I was at a circus watching the entertainment. In one act, a man made a lion jumo through a burning loop. I didn't like this at all for the lion, so I stood up and shouted "bad mister!" to the man who forced the lion.

Another example was when I was a young teenager. I was on holiday with my parents and uncle and ant. Some day my uncle got the message that his father had died. Of course, my uncle was shocked, nad though I didn't know his father at all I was very sad.

Duh.

Nothing new.

I always say my empathy is messed up. When I know someone experiencing an emotion or being hurt I can't help but feel what he feels.

In my schoollife I was bullied a lot but I avoided fighting back and I was extremely sorry when I lost control and hurt someone because I didn't want to see anybody being hurt. Not even the bullies. When I seen someone hurt I was feeling as if I was being hurt as well. It could be a friend or someone I hated - it didn't matter, it was painful for me in both cases.

NTs display false-empathy a lot, and they don't feel like creeps for "faking it" like autistics do either. Which in turn could mean that the typical NT actually feels less empathy, although they fake-it more which gives the illusion of the opposite.

When boys in high school picked me over my best friend saying I was prettier, I'd immediately become jealous and insulted on my friend's behalf. She never said it bothered her, but I imagined it would and expressed outraged feelings on her behalf.

When I see someone get hurt, I often feel a jolt of sensation in my body, like a clinching of muscles in my stomach. So seeing an incident where someone gets injured causes unpleasant feelings, though I seem to have somehow gotten used to seeing it in cartoons where it is frequently the source of the humor; but even though I don't get somatic sensations of pain, I still don't remember regarding injury as funny when I watched cartoons as a child.

And my response of seeing Sylvester the Cat pulled by a string tied to his tail through an air duct or keyhole was not laughing, but more along the lines of questions of "I wonder how long it took him to heal from that pain?"

Or once I was de-conditioned, the questions that flurried in my mind were more like: "I wonder who thinks this is funny?" I guess the NT researchers have only seen the naive part of that sentiment, and have been oblivious to the undercurrent of empathic content?

This makes so much sense, I can't believe I'd never thought of this before. All our senses are just too strong. I hate when my parents argue, it's too much on me. People talking is too much for me because of all which is happening in these conversations in terms of emotions. There is no way I can suddenly process it all at once. This is a huge self-realisation for me, sorry if this reply seems cluttered.

No study was cited in the blog post; seems like a couple people just came up with a hypothesis which is being inaccurately referred to as a theory. The link to the original article does not work for me.