Can you have empathy for others but still have AS?

TNSe wrote:I think the concensus has been that AS have problems showing empathy, but they got shitloads of it. Also I have learnt to read and use sarcasm/irony.

This... so much this. I can be very concerned or upset for other people but I have a very difficult time expressing negative emotions.

I think a lot of Aspies have this sort of 'delayed empathy' due to a disconnect between cognitive and emotional empathy. Most of us are fully capable of emotional empathy but it takes a long time to process it. If I screw up and ruin someone's day, i may not feel much emotion initially but later that day, the emotions come down, and pretty hard; it just takes time to think about them and let them set in.

jag140 wrote:

TNSe wrote:I think the concensus has been that AS have problems showing empathy, but they got shitloads of it. Also I have learnt to read and use sarcasm/irony.

This... so much this. I can be very concerned or upset for other people but I have a very difficult time expressing negative emotions.

I think a lot of Aspies have this sort of 'delayed empathy' due to a disconnect between cognitive and emotional empathy. Most of us are fully capable of emotional empathy but it takes a long time to process it. If I screw up and ruin someone's day, i may not feel much emotion initially but later that day, the emotions come down, and pretty hard; it just takes time to think about them and let them set in.

Never heard of the delayed empathy, and I don't experience that myself, but that's quite interesting.
How do you feel at the point of realising that you've messed up and ruined someones day or something?
Do you get logical thinking instead of emotional? ie; you try to fix things at that point, and then start feeling bad afterwards if logical thinking doesn't solve the issue?


If I mess up, I immediately feel like someone has grabbed my heart and is squeezing it.. I feel awful.. and then try to fix whatever I've done.
I'm rubbish at showing how I'm feeling.. would be so much easier if people could just mindread and understand my experience of emotion and empathy that way.
I also read people a lot better than most other people seem to, I can tell by a glance how someone is feeling.. whether they're sad, happy, annoyed.
Not sure if that's part of the hypervigilance of PTSD.. in that I had to learn very rapidly to read peoples emotional states and to stay away if necessary.
Doesn't make socialising any easier at all though - just means i can see if someone thinks i'm being weird or something, but I can't manage to prevent myself from coming across that way (like if I'm avoiding eye contact, looking very anxious, or sounding like an idiot during a conversation etc).

Yes. ASD is a collection of any number of symptoms, and those of us with it don't necessarily follow one specific road map. Personally, my empathy fluctuates: I either feel everything or nothing at all.

I've noticed that i don't feel much empathy for people with normal lives but i can easily empathize with people with problems and they feel safe wth me too. My life has always been filled with fear and pain so i don't understand how normal worrying feels like. I also can't help but feel jealous of those people even when i like them and it makes me feel bad.

seabreezeblue wrote:Never heard of the delayed empathy, and I don't experience that myself, but that's quite interesting.
How do you feel at the point of realising that you've messed up and ruined someones day or something?
Do you get logical thinking instead of emotional? ie; you try to fix things at that point, and then start feeling bad afterwards if logical thinking doesn't solve the issue?

It really depends on my mood on whether or not I feel cognitive or emotional empathy for, say, ruining someone's day. I guess there is a sort of emotional empathy but a lot of it is seeking a sort of peace of mind, e.g. if I really screw up, I need to feel forgiven for what I did, otherwise I'll keep ruminating about the issue.

Usually the cognitive, logical empathy precedes the emotional empathy and I need to think about what I did but when I finally make the connection, I get the feels as well.

petrossa wrote:There is only on cause of the lack of conscious awareness of empathy and that is that the communication module of the brain that links the two is underdeveloped.

Nothing more nothing less. Neurological fact.

You seems read and searched a lot. Are you an Aspie yourself? If so, even with this knowledge of yours I guess you still don't have empathy, no? I have an Aspie friend like you, I want to know. Thanks.

The more you read about Aspergers, the more you realize it has little to do with empathy and a lot of the social issues presented in a lot of lazy psych articles.

Mirror neurons that mimic empathy and how we analyze face seem to have the possibility of getting overwhelmed and thus it is hard for us to keep eye contact and potentially feel the full emotional experience of the other person since the emotional mimicry is compromised in some way.

I probably have slightly below average empathy at this time. I can help people with what they can be experiencing and give them advice, but at times i still don't know why they act the way they do in some situations. I am still trying to figure some of it out. I have known other aspies with more empathy and social drive than myself.

Might be good for people to read Asperger's work.
The empathy he talks about is to imagine someone else's perception and perspective.
It is the Mary experiment.
There's Mary and the subject.
Someone puts and apple or something in a basket and there are two baskets.
Mary goes out the room.
Then the experimenter takes the apple and puts it in the other basket.
Then he asks the child where will Mary look for the apple.
The Aspie will point to the basket with the apple, the normal in the empty basket.

It can be an issue, like not noticing people are spying on you, or that you have to appear in certain ways. If you work, you might not realize you have to work faster when the supervisor comes around. It shows in plenty of situations.

It's not about caring and that type of stuff. It's not about reading minds either, albeit perhaps to some degree. Not reading face, yes, can be an issue as well. But empathy in its fullest sense today also involves acting appropriately in situations with others, so in that sense it is a problem, but not the way people think, or for the reasons people think. Now I don't know the reasons. Could be the same as in Mary experiment. Lots of unsaid assumptions, cheating, hypocrisy, wearing masks. Those would be harder to deal with. Of course entering and exiting social situations as well which involve lots of small plays and so on. What to say, what not to say, when not to do something, when to do something. Or even what is right to do and not. Responding to other's emotions essentially is the big issue, but also responding to their perception is less obvious.

An Aspie who knows about his disorders but still lured and manipulated others to get what he wanted, does he has empathy ??