Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi all,
I'm new to this community and excited reading many stories in the community.Recently I've been reading several articles about 'double empathy problems' and I've learnt about 'emotional empathy' which autistic people tend to be good at, that we can feel the same as other people (highly empathetic). But autistic people are not good at 'cognitive empathy' (the famous 'theory of mind' thing), where we're bad at cognitively prospecting people's emotions or thoughts.
I feel that this describes me exactly. I think I'm very empathetic (or sympathetic). I cry when I watch films or even trailers. I think I can tell when people get angry or uncomfortable when I'm with them (but I don't know why, but I can't do that with text only or voice only communication. I think I need face and body language to feel it). But I don't know at all how to fix it or approach it for them.
Now I'm curious about other people's experiences with this. I read several community chats here about empathy and what I thought was there're both people (who think themselves highly empathetic or not at all). Do you have any thoughts or stories?
Thank you.
On the 'read the mind in the eyes' test I scored well above the neurotypical average. I am a good visual artist and draw portraits, I think this ability feeds into the ease in which I read facial expressions. I am poor at body language, however, and poor at 'reading between the lines' in conversation.
I tried this test and scored 19, now sure where that puts me but seems quite low??
I always thought I was quite good at reading people’s faces but this tells me different.
I think some of the emotions given in the multiple choice answers are rather unlikely. Certainly, a few I would class as impossible to recognise, or even to express in any combination of facial muscle activation. Charles Darwin wrote a book, 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals' on the subject and I'm sure he didn't include some of the strange alleged 'emotions' included in the test.