"Aspies lack empathy" - says who?

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Saying that autistic people lack empathy is like saying Vladimir Putin has Asperger's based upon an X-ray

This 2014 paper found no difference whatsoever between empathetic response:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24424389

Even Simon Baron-Cohen agrees that ASD people don't lack empathetic response since that has to do with affective empathy. It's the cognitive empathy, the reading of non-verbal and social cues and perhaps picking up on the emotions of others that we have a problem with.

I don't have a problem with picking us on non-verbal social things either.
Even as a young child I can remember having an average recognition (average for my age) of people's emotions through body language and facial expressions. It must be from instinct because I've always had attention issues, such as ADD.

My mom has told me I have empathy but everyone else has contradicted it, my husband and kids at my school, my therapist I saw in high school, my ex boyfriend. I wonder if my mom is just being crazy or if she understands me so of course she knows it's there while other people will assume it's not.

I used to think that caring for others was empathy and taking care of others and doing what others want you to do. Is feeling bad for others or sorry for others empathy or is that sympathy? What about understanding?

I remember being told at 14 that people with more Asperger's don't care about others and they don't care if they hurt your feelings. I remember thinking then "I am so glad I don't have it bad or I would be a bad person." In my view not caring about others makes you a bad person because only good people care about others and don't like to hurt others feelings. I realize some normal people are like this too and we call them as*holes.

I have seen people dismiss AS and the reason is "I care about others and think of others and their feelings and I have empathy" or a parent being confused about the possibility of their kid having it because they care about others and are always concerned about how others feel and how sensitive they are. People get so misinformed, they don't think they can possibly have it or their child.

I am sure some aspies do truly lack it but is it because of their autism or is it just because they are a cold hearted person? I have seen some of that here too just by what they have written in their posts and the things they say and I find those people here scary. That just reinforces my mother's stereotype about aspies being cold hearted jerks. I can remember asking her as a kid if they can learn to care about others and she said some can learn but some have it so bad they aren't able to learn. I remember feeling sorry for them that have it so bad they are bad people because of it and I was happy with myself and how lucky I am to still be a good person and how AS doesn't make me bad. This was back when I was still new to it and didn't understand what AS was despite having the diagnoses so I was asking my mom questions about it and she would tell me some things about it.

Good post League Girl.

Jono, the study I posted is long and detailed but basically it concluded that ASD and the NT control group noticed and reacted to pain fairly equally, the brains of ASD people reacted as strongly, based on their cognitive perception of people in pain.

I don't lack empathy. I always feel concerned when someone seems upset, and want to try to help. I don't know if this is empathy, but my brother has seizures, and when he has a seizure I always feel faint. I really hate seeing people in distress.

From my experience, most NTs don't comfort someone all the time when they are upset, either.

The bell curve again (I suspect) - if you rounded up all the ASPs in world and measured their empathies you would find the usual pattern of distribution for the empathy characteristic - at one tail there would the super-empathetic, at the other tail there would be the completely unempathetic, and the rest normally distributed in the curve, with the greatest percentage in the centre at the peak of the curve. Same for NTs.

You wouldn't get a curve wildly skewed to the tail of no empathy. It's time the whole no empathy thing is laid to rest. Perhaps Baron-Cohen will surprise us all in future (I hope) and say "I was wrong and I am sorry for the distress I caused". Could happen.
Not likely but possible...

Sorry, I should of made this clear. What you're describing is still, by definition, affective empathy, not cognitive empathy. The fact that they reacted to a perception of pain is irrelevant, simply the fact that they reacted to it is what makes it affective empathy because the definition of affective empathy is the reaction.

Cognitive empathy is simply the reading of facial expressions and understanding of non-verbal forms of communication, which is something that we do definitely have problems with. However, that does not necessarily mean that pain is always missed or that we can't have a reaction to it if there is a perception of pain.

I don't think there's anything wrong with lacking empathy, like there's nothing wrong with lacking intelligence.

I don't show my feelings regarding empathy much, but I do feel some empathy, but mostly in the abstract sense. I also try to avoid people who are in extremely emotional states, as it makes me very uncomfortable. I pick up on the strong emotions they are giving off, and it is very unsettling--kind of like being zapped with some form of electricity. I think what makes me seem less empathetic though, is my lack of an ability to form close bonds with other people. I have never been good at that, and have gotten worse over the years. Naturally, if you don't feel close to someone, you are not going to feel as strongly as they do about something going on in their life. When they see that you are not feeling as strongly about something as they are, they can get upset and mad at you. This adds to my reasons for needing to avoid people who are experiencing strong emotions.

For the record, I am sorry world and relatives, but I just can't feel as strongly about something you are experiencing, but that isn't happening to me. If it's something bad, I am sorry about that too, but again, I am not going to join you in freaking out if it's not happening to me. I sometimes don't freak out even if it DOES happen to me. A few years ago, when I was told I had cancer, the doctor was upset, and my family was upset. I was just thinking that it kind of went with all the other crap that was going on in my life at the time. Freaking out would not have helped anyway. I did research and talked to the doctors. I had surgery and treatment, and I'm okay now, cancer wise. Got other health issues, but I am working on those, too.

Empathy helps us to understand what others are going through, but too much empathy is actually a bad thing. It can make us too helpless to deal with a problem. It can have a negative effect on our health because of the stress it can cause. It can make us too melodramatic, and then make us drive other people crazy with our drama queen antics. People who expect others to go hyper empathetic with them whenever they have a problem are being unrealistic, and are also being drama queens.

If someone gives you a hard time about your seeming lack of empathy to their issues, just tell them you tend to internalize your feelings--and in the future, spend less time with those people. Life is stressful enough, without having to deal with people who needlessly generate more stress.

Warning, long stupid possibly totally offtopic post ahead.

I often have so much empathy it hurts. I'm not even exaggerating. I read about the Kitty Genovese murder a couple of years back, and I was agonizing over it for weeks. That poor lady. I kept putting myself in her head and I could not stop. I often have to write fictionalized versions of actual events that have bothered me just to get it out of my system.

I read a story once--a completely fictional story--where a starving man went to check his traps. He was hoping he'd caught a nice fat raccoon but the trap was empty. I felt so awful for the poor starving man. Then he went and checked his fish traps. There was a nice big fish in the trap, so he would not starve! But then I felt so awful for the poor trapped fish! I don't think I ever finished reading that story... ;_;

I also can't re-read the ancient Egyptian novels of Pauline Gedge because the stuff that happens to her characters is just so depressing, it wears on me for ages. I liked those books, too...

So hopefully that explains my empathy some.

But the thing is I'm not always so good at SHOWING it. I grew up in a household where demonstrations of emotion, good or bad, are sometimes expected (when I don't feel right displaying them) or discouraged (when I feel like displaying them). If I show concern for my parents, they get angry about me worrying too much. But if I don't show concern or interest, they get angry and call me selfish and uncaring. I get this reaction from other people too--in my many failed attempts to make friends online, if I show too much interest I'm demanding and clingy and they stop writing to me, but if I show too little interest I'm selfish and cold and they stop writing to me.

I've also been criticized not just for expressing negative emotions or too little interest in something, but for expressing happiness and showing too much enthusiasm! (I used to try to read stories to my parents when I was little and they would tell me to go bother somebody else...if I laugh too loudly, I'm snapped at to quiet down. Etc.)

There have also been MANY times I expressed empathy for somebody and it blew up in my face--the person turned out to be a jerk, or they were faking something for the attention, or they didn't even notice or care that I responded, or I must have expressed my concern in the wrong way so they were angered/offended by it, or somebody else was offended by me showing concern for that person, or I was told that I think I'm better than everyone else, etc. etc. etc., I should have just kept my stupid mouth shut.

In short, displaying empathy (and all the other things that entails, such as interest in a person, emotional reactions, etc.) seems like a minefield and I can never set foot in the right place without something blowing up on me.

So I do FEEL empathy--far more often than I'd like, in fact, seeing how few people I care strongly about seem to care about me whatsoever in return--but finding the proper way to express it is another matter entirely. I learned the hard way not to be too emotionally demonstrative, since that scares people off. But apparently, not being emotionally demonstrative enough makes people angry. I don't know, there are so many times I thought I was displaying the right amount of emotion/empathy but perhaps I was wrong. I never seem to get it right so it's far easier to just keep to myself and not let people know just how much I care, so much that it hurts.

And, yes, someone else mentioned not wanting to go to funerals, not because they don't care, but because it's just such an uncomfortable experience...I'm much similar. I hate going to visit people in hospitals--not because I don't care, I just hate going to hospitals. Plus I never know the right things to say when someone is hurting. (See all the above for proof.) My niece held a little performance while my mother and I were visiting my brother's family once, and I did not want to watch it--not because I don't care, but because I just wasn't interested and I had other things to do, and, I admit, I felt envious because MY self-expression wasn't encouraged in such a way by my family when I was little. (I watched it anyway, to be polite and avoid the anger of my mother later on.) Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention my near-total inability to form close friendships, or even be very interested in people, unless we have a lot of interests in common; I do CARE about incompatible people, I just can't summon a large amount of interest in getting CLOSE to them. It's too much work for too little payoff. (I can't begin to describe the tons of criticism I've received about that over the years. )

I admit there are lots of times when my empathy isn't THAT great, but I still do care, and I do try hard to at least do the polite thing even if my heart isn't entirely in it. And for every instance where I don't really care THAT much, there's an instance where I care TOO much. But people seem to focus on the times when I don't seem to care, and assume that I'm a selfish, inconsiderate person. While conveniently forgetting all the times I cared so much it annoyed them.

My parents frequently call me selfish. My mother has outright said I like to make other people miserable. (One time all I said was, "Last night I was having a really bad time," before she launched into a tirade of, "You think bad things only ever happen to YOU and never to anybody else!"--I have never, ever, EVER claimed that. ) Even my former therapist, who suggested Asperger's to me, once said perhaps I'm too selfish. I know I can be selfish, but I try hard to work through it and still care for others even when my heart isn't totally in it...and like I said, much of the time, my heart is in it too much. When I expressed my concern for others, it bothered them, so I learned to keep it to myself. And now that makes me unempathic and selfish? So confusing.

I also suffer from a similar problem of not being able to tell when others are empathic or not...often I mistake sarcasm for sincere empathy, and alternately, if somebody doesn't express obvious enthusiasm for something, then I feel I'm bothering them, despite what they say to the contrary...I still haven't written to that friend of mine, even a few weeks later, because she didn't really seem interested in hearing from me...so many times I have had people tell me one thing and mean another...minefields upon minefields.

...

Er...I think my post has really missed the point of the thread, apologies. But here's a small part that's actually pertinent. That therapist who suggested I could have Asperger's? I dismissed the suggestion outright, largely because I'd been informed that Aspies lack empathy. And if you actually read the entire post above (kudos if you did), you should see that a general lack of empathy is not one of my issues. Therefore, I figured there was no way I could have Asperger's. And she never brought it up again.

Still kicking myself over that one.

Based on what little reading I've done so far I think it's not so much that Aspies lack empathy, as that they're not so good at expressing it properly, and/or they just feel it in situations or amounts different from "normal" people...I'm pretty sure that if my NT parents were to have read that article about Kitty Genovese, or the story about the starving man and the fish, it wouldn't have bothered THEM for weeks on end. They wouldn't have called my feelings empathy, they would have called them weird.

And that's exactly why empathy is so difficult to express. Why express it when all you get in return is criticism?