What actually is the diagnostic criteria for autism?

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It just seems really confusing. The National autistic society says the triad of impairments is difficulty with the following:

Social Interaction
Communication
Social imagination

Social imagination means the ability to empathies & put yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't it? But yet there seem to be many people with autism diagnoses who don't have any issues with empathy. Some people with autism even say they have "too" much empathy, but apparently a lack of empathy is a part of the criteria for autism.

Is a lack of empathy part of the triad of impairments? If so; then why do so many people with autism (especially Aspergers) not have an issue with empathy? If it's not part of the criteria then why do so many things like the NAS claim it is?

I'm so confused! Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

It must be a need for more social bees ?

I don't quite understand.

for the social bees (be social)

under this post are more diagnosis posts, and there are also some about NAS here on wp

The impairment of and communication skills are only apparent and the empathy thing I agree it is bollocks because we Aspergians can have profound empathy for another human being. If we cannot put ourselves in the shoes of others. Who are others? The answer allistics but they can put themselves in our shoes and they don't want to and even compromise with us unless we are the ones doing the compromising. They also don't understand will not get that we or a lot of us find things like eye contact rather creepy it is too intimate. You would hug a stranger and its the same principle.

Empathy again? Seriously?

There are two kinds of empathy. Cognitive empathy and affective/emotional empathy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_empathy#Types

People with autism/Asperger have trouble with cognitive empathy, meaning we find it hard to FIGURE OUT what someone might think/feel. But the affective/emotional empathy works just fine, meaning that when we KNOW what someone feels/thinks we can feel how he feels.

We lack the ability to see what someone feels/thinks by his body language and indirect messages but we can get what they experience when it is specified, like when they directly tell us what they think or we see them experiencing something we can identify with.

For example when we see someone cut their finger and it's bleeding so we know it must hurt and some of us might feel it really deeply because it might bring back our own memories of how a cut finger hurts. And when we know someone have been dumped we can identify with their feelings because we know how being rejected hurts.

But when someone is having a dull face and making random angry/sad comments because they got heartbroken or have a headache but they don't tell us what is bothering them we won't guess what is wrong and some of us won't even realize anything is wrong.

Psychopaths are the opposite. They have cognitive empathy - they understand body language and they know what someone feels - but they don't give a damn because they can't feel the affective/emotional empathy. They know someone is hurt but it doesn't bother them since it doesn't cause adequate emotional reaction in their own body and mind.

Yes the "lack of empathy" thing is a misleading way of putting it. What they mean is an impaired ability to read the emotions of others. It's misleading to call it empathy because empathy has multiple definitions, and one of them is about caring. When compared with the entire population, autistic people don't have a particular problem with caring.

Yes, it is called deficits in Theory of mind; "mind-blindness" and "context-blindness".

Until recently it was thought Autistics had deficits in empathy in general but in the last few years the distinction has been made between cognitive and affective empathy. Some clinicians still diagnose based on the older understanding. Because we have been falsely accused of having no empathy, I see a disturbing trend among some autistics to claim there is no empathy issue at all, or claim empathy issues are solely based on NT/Autistic brain wiring differences.

That shows the damage done by badly-designed nomenclature and experts who don't keep their expertise up to date. I think it's time they dropped the term "empathy" alltogether and started using clearer, more self-evident words for these things. But I bet they won't.

What else would they be based on? Why is this disturbing?

I have empathy for people, but I also erroneously assume that most people have thoughts that are very like mine. It's often hard to recognize how different the perceptions and thoughts of other people are. That is an empathy problem.

I believe this is a feature of autism and is related to some underlying neurological difference. How could it be otherwise?

I have diagnosis of AS (F84.5 in ICD-10) since few years, but I do not remember assuming that thoughts of others are like mine. I do not see so much problems with social imagination and cognitive empathy in me. So I may have almost no problems associated with one of areas from autistic triad - social imagination. I think that my condition is an other sort of autism which probably is associated with more "neurotypical" brain. But I am not so high functioning despite it now.

Empathy issues may be based on differing personality and differing life experiences. Exp. some Autistic white people might not emphasize with a black person discussing their problems with police harassment or a self made rich Autistic may have no empathy for another autistic on disability for their autism. In these cases their autism may not be a factor or a partial factor for their lack of empathy.

If as a community we blame all empathy deficits we have on NT/Autism brain wiring differences we are at least partially incorrectly identifying the problem thus increasing the chances of an incorrect solution and that is disturbing.

The triad of impairments are outdated, but still in the ICD, although I don't think that explanation quite cuts the mustard.

Here are the criteria for "childhood autism". The criteria for Asperger's Syndrome (still a theoretically valid diagnosis in the UK) are here.