Empathy ??? Simon Baron-Cohen

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Hi very new to the site, but below is a part of another post I posted I thought the question was so important I would pose the question separately.
So I read that being autistic means not having empathy Professor Simon Baron-Cohen but I struggle to not get upset if I see someone or something in distress I try very hard not to show it I fight back the tears and wait until I am alone but am extremely motivated to want to help. Is that not empathy, perhaps I miss the subtle signs that someone is not happy and my wife often points this out to me especially if it is her. But I am deeply affected perhaps far more than is "normal" or healthy do others struggle with the same.

On a side-note: Simon Baron-Cohen is the cousin of the comedian that does Borat. That said, I think that Autistic people often have more than the average amount of empathy or less than the normal amount of empathy, but seldom the average amount. Myself, I tend to be over-empathic which sometimes makes me forget about my own needs.

The way I have had it explained to me is that there is a difference between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is when you feel for someone else's distress and wish you could help them feel better. I think autistics are usually good at this. Whereas empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and imagine how they are experiencing something and what they are thinking and what their motivations are. This is something that autistics can have trouble with.

The example i was given is is that if you see someone cross the street and get injured when a car hits them, you feel for them (that's sympathy) but you might not know or understand why they crossed the street in the first place, especially if it seemed unsafe to do so (that's empathy).

Autistic or non-autistic, it is a lot easier to put yourself in someone else's shoes if that person's shoes are about the right size and shape for you. So, to exercise empathy with someone of the same sex, from your own culture living at the same time as yourself is a lot easier than to imagine what motives someone living in Africa 40.000 years ago had for acting in a certain way. For the same reason Autistics can have problem with putting themselves in a non-autistics shoes and non-autistics have a similar problem with Autistic shoes. That's the double empathy problem.

I think there's far to much emphasis put on empathy. I don't care for it myself.

Hearing how we're not supposed to have empathy all the time makes me want to scream.
I think it's the NTs that usually don't have empathy for us.

I actually think you're right.

And yet the amount of people that think if they existed in a certain era they would have been so different

The Double Empathy problem