Feeling others emotions in the room

Autismman said:

Does anyone ever experience an unease around people sometimes in the sense that if they are on edge or stressed or maybe even going through some personal struggles this is passed onto you and makes you unsettled also.

A lot of this is because communication is only partially verbal and there are loads of other behavioral and visual cues that you may not conciously notice but have probably been informed subconciously by.

The way the person looks about, their stance, how they move their hands, nervous movements (flicking hair, chewing nails, frequent eye movements etc) and the behaviour of others around them - all these are clues you may not realise your autistic senses are absorbing.

Empathy is also quite an autistic trait so picking up on the feeling without realising it will often have you mirroring it to them as well.

We are complicated things us humans.

Iain said:

so picking up on the feeling without realising it will often have you mirroring it to them as well.

That’s an interesting insight, something I had never considered. Would it be a typical human social response to imitate or mimic their behaviour back at them or an autistic behaviour do you think? 

Autismman said:

Would it be a typical human social response to imitate or mimic their behaviour back at them or an autistic behaviour do you think? 

It is for empathic people as we tend to attune to their emotions and often find outselves subconciously mimicing them. 

I notice that only about 1% of the population are empaths ( https://genuineempath.com/how-rare-is-an-empath/ ) which could indicate that autists are more likely to be one since it is an autistic trait.

There is an interesting article on it here:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/empathy-and-autism.html

Thank you for that Iain, was reading the second article but it was quite difficult for me to understand. It’s simply enough to read but using my mind to distinguish between the two and their differences not so much. Cognitive would be ones own acknowledgment that someone is feeling a certain way from the way of you naturally  perceive them (factual without the feeling/emotion) and emotional empathy is a feeling you get perhaps when you can physically experience and see that persons upset, as in they a would be outwardly expressing that by crying etc provoking a response from your own emotions? 

Thank you for that Iain, was reading the second article but it was quite difficult for me to understand. It’s simply enough to read but using my mind to distinguish between the two and their differences not so much. Cognitive would be ones own acknowledgment that someone is feeling a certain way from the way of you naturally  perceive them (factual without the feeling/emotion) and emotional empathy is a feeling you get perhaps when you can physically experience and see that persons upset, as in they a would be outwardly expressing that by crying etc provoking a response from your own emotions?