Another study claims we have less empathy

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My NT boyfriend says I'm the most empathetic and understanding girlfriend he's ever had, and no, he's not lying, because I know how empathetic I am. I feel and express too much emotion, and I am easily affected by other people's moods.

Oops - that's a bit of an ambiguous parse!


As far as I understand it, alexithymia isn't a "condition", it's merely a descriptor of certain dimensions of personality. If the autistic people "without alexithymia" were found to have the same problems as those "with alexithymia", then by definition, they are alexithymic.

How well do you pick up on subtle changes in other people's moods, as opposed to being very affected by obvious changes in their moods? Also, is your boyfriend very good at verbalizing his feelings and the reasons for them?

But please don't undermine my skills, I don't have many skills but empathy is one of them, and I don't like being doubted just because I'm on the spectrum.

I'm sorry to have made you feel undermined.

I've been told that I am a very "understanding" person too, though perhaps I'm "understanding" in a very different way than you are. In my case, I do NOT pick up on subtleties well, at least not in real time, especially with people I don't know very well, but I can be very empathetic when someone is talking to me about their feelings or about goings-on in their life.

Empathy is a loaded term that means different things.

I used to struggle immensely with cognitive empathy, or rationalizing perspectives outside of your own. I have made vast improvements in the last couple years on this, due to a lot of forced, mass social interaction and introspection on my social failures. I've also researched a lot about human behavior and motivations, which helps.

I always have, and still do, struggle with affective empathy, which appears to be what is being described in the research, the whole "sharing and communicating feelings fluidly" thing. People confuse this with compassion when it's really more like "emotional resonance." An ASD person is likely to miss this resonance because of communication and other difficulties. I suspect this is what "masking" is covering up...that behavior that would normally manifest from experiencing typical levels of affective empathy (the fake smiles and gestures which indicate interest and enjoyment of interaction). I look at this as the "struggles to feel group humor or becomes withdrawn during complex social interaction" issue. Perhaps I am defining it poorly and someone can correct me, because I see a lot of ASD people vehemently defend their experience of affective empathy as though it is the same thing as compassion and expressing sympathy. Perhaps I am making the mistake in definition.

I have a lot of compassion for suffering, which is increased by my improvements in cognitive empathy. I can fathom, to a degree, how awful life circumstances can be for others, and I feel strongly about improving the life quality of all humans. It causes me severe distress sometimes thinking about it.

I have a hard time with cognitive empathy, I don't always react the right way or say what is expected.

I have extreme emotional empathy. I think being overly being affected by emotional resonance is one of the biggest blocks to my being able to communicate with others.

I probably come across as having lower compassion than most. I can't help it, but because of the high emotional empathy, I can feel if people are not genuine in their suffering and I don't respond with much care if they aren't. I have a lot of compassion for people in situations out of their control--extreme weather, starvation from war politics. Someone who trips and falls because the are texting and not looking, I probably wouldn't stop to help because my first reaction would be that it's their own fault.