Discovery 3 - Empathy (and testing)

Lotus said:

Cognitive empathy is the ability to know how other people feel and what they might be thinking. Also known as perspective taking

I personally certainly have the ability to understand how other people feel and or what they might tink. I can't necessarily consciously consider that in real time in the heat of the situation, and I can't necessarily  articulate my reaction, respond to the situation in the NT expected way, sometimes I don't know what the NT reaction should be, but I do know my reaction could be wrong, so I start double guessing myself and get paralysis by analysis, I get more anxious, and a sequence of misunderstandings can start.

Rocinante said:

So much nonsense is written about autists and their empathy quotient.  It is largely misunderstanding and misconception based on a neurotypical idea of how empathy should manifest in human beings.  The double empathy problem sums it up for me.  It isn't just we autists who have mindblindness.  It works both ways.  I might not know how to respond if I come across a person in an agony of despair, but it doesn't mean that I don't understand what they're going through

I completely relate to this.

And this " I dislike the pathologising, deficit-based framing of the best-known theories of autism, and I hate the mistakes they lead to in practice: assuming we lack empathy and have no idea what’s going on in anyone else’s head; painting autistic cognition as inherently more ‘male’; expecting skills we’re slow to pick up as kids to be lacking throughout our lives.": https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/me-and-monotropism-unified-theory-autism

The double empathy problem and the recent research that AS/AS people are equally good at empathizing and passing information as NT/NT, but AS/NT are not as good at all. Basically confirming to some extent  the double empathy problem. http://dart.ed.ac.uk/research/nd-iq/

There are so many autism theories and a lot of discussion exists about the interpretation of what is actually happening. The theories often reflect the observation from the outside in, which ignores the lived experience and voices of autistic people themselves. Then there is an additional layer when autistic people learn the theories and internalise them, so start using that language 'I don't have empathy'. At this point it is difficult to know what is really happening.

There is no agreed theory and no evidence that  NT are actually 'feeling' the emotions and 'understanding' the thoughts of others. The theory is they are making a guess and autistic people make guesses too, but our guesses are less confident and less accurate because our experience is so different.

There are so many theories of empathy, how it actually work. It is about directly feeling what other people feel or is it about projecting, and if projecting do you project your own feelings, or what you would feel from your own experience, or do you read the other person's body language or both and in what proportion... Chawn made an entire book of it. 

This article is really good. https://aeon.co/essays/the-autistic-view-of-the-world-is-not-the-neurotypical-cliche: 

It notes that there is a very empathetic discussion going on between autistic people on social media, contrary to the 'theory'. It highlights that the discussion about autism traits and empathy is happening from the NT observer point of view, only looking at NT signals, NT ways of communication, while it should happen from within, from the authentic autistic perspective.

The observation about pain is very poignant and interesting. I read something similar from an autistic blogger about women in labour not 'performing' pain in childbirth and therefore not being helped buy the midwives.

'The DSM goes on to note ‘apparent indifference to pain’, which might well be true if you judge pain and its responses only in neurotypical terms. Many autistic people experience the sensory sensitivities noted in the DSM-5 as pain, hence the ‘extreme distress’. What’s more, autistics routinely report that they are undermedicated or dismissed when they’re in physical pain, possibly because their facial expressions and vocalisations don’t match what doctors expect to see in the general population. A 2009 study by the psychologist Silvie Tordjman at Paris Descartes University and colleagues monitored the heart-rate of autistic children when blood was drawn, finding that they experienced the same levels of pain as nonautistic children, but were half as likely to be given an anaesthetic.'

I read something similar from an autistic blogger about women in labour not 'performing' pain in childbirth and therefore not being helped buy the midwives: .https://autistrhi.com/2017/12/14/autism-labour-and-birth/

So it would seem that autistic people simply don't perform empathy in a NT way

Lotus said:

Cognitive empathy is the ability to know how other people feel and what they might be thinking. Also known as perspective taking

I personally certainly have the ability to understand how other people feel and or what they might tink. I can't necessarily consciously consider that in real time in the heat of the situation, and I can't necessarily  articulate my reaction, respond to the situation in the NT expected way, sometimes I don't know what the NT reaction should be, but I do know my reaction could be wrong, so I start double guessing myself and get paralysis by analysis, I get more anxious, and a sequence of misunderstandings can start.

Rocinante said:

So much nonsense is written about autists and their empathy quotient.  It is largely misunderstanding and misconception based on a neurotypical idea of how empathy should manifest in human beings.  The double empathy problem sums it up for me.  It isn't just we autists who have mindblindness.  It works both ways.  I might not know how to respond if I come across a person in an agony of despair, but it doesn't mean that I don't understand what they're going through

I completely relate to this.

And this " I dislike the pathologising, deficit-based framing of the best-known theories of autism, and I hate the mistakes they lead to in practice: assuming we lack empathy and have no idea what’s going on in anyone else’s head; painting autistic cognition as inherently more ‘male’; expecting skills we’re slow to pick up as kids to be lacking throughout our lives.": https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/me-and-monotropism-unified-theory-autism

The double empathy problem and the recent research that AS/AS people are equally good at empathizing and passing information as NT/NT, but AS/NT are not as good at all. Basically confirming to some extent  the double empathy problem. http://dart.ed.ac.uk/research/nd-iq/

There are so many autism theories and a lot of discussion exists about the interpretation of what is actually happening. The theories often reflect the observation from the outside in, which ignores the lived experience and voices of autistic people themselves. Then there is an additional layer when autistic people learn the theories and internalise them, so start using that language 'I don't have empathy'. At this point it is difficult to know what is really happening.

There is no agreed theory and no evidence that  NT are actually 'feeling' the emotions and 'understanding' the thoughts of others. The theory is they are making a guess and autistic people make guesses too, but our guesses are less confident and less accurate because our experience is so different.

There are so many theories of empathy, how it actually work. It is about directly feeling what other people feel or is it about projecting, and if projecting do you project your own feelings, or what you would feel from your own experience, or do you read the other person's body language or both and in what proportion... Chawn made an entire book of it. 

This article is really good. https://aeon.co/essays/the-autistic-view-of-the-world-is-not-the-neurotypical-cliche: 

It notes that there is a very empathetic discussion going on between autistic people on social media, contrary to the 'theory'. It highlights that the discussion about autism traits and empathy is happening from the NT observer point of view, only looking at NT signals, NT ways of communication, while it should happen from within, from the authentic autistic perspective.

The observation about pain is very poignant and interesting. I read something similar from an autistic blogger about women in labour not 'performing' pain in childbirth and therefore not being helped buy the midwives.

'The DSM goes on to note ‘apparent indifference to pain’, which might well be true if you judge pain and its responses only in neurotypical terms. Many autistic people experience the sensory sensitivities noted in the DSM-5 as pain, hence the ‘extreme distress’. What’s more, autistics routinely report that they are undermedicated or dismissed when they’re in physical pain, possibly because their facial expressions and vocalisations don’t match what doctors expect to see in the general population. A 2009 study by the psychologist Silvie Tordjman at Paris Descartes University and colleagues monitored the heart-rate of autistic children when blood was drawn, finding that they experienced the same levels of pain as nonautistic children, but were half as likely to be given an anaesthetic.'

I read something similar from an autistic blogger about women in labour not 'performing' pain in childbirth and therefore not being helped buy the midwives: .https://autistrhi.com/2017/12/14/autism-labour-and-birth/

So it would seem that autistic people simply don't perform empathy in a NT way