Affective vs. Cognitive Empathy
That's affective empathy.
I'm bad at cognitive empathy, but have plenty of affective empathy. I don't even watch the news due to the amount of suffering on them.
Yeah, they automatically assume that someone else would feel like they would feel in that situation. Which has an obvious flaw, but it works when the other person is like them.
Logic has little to do with CE, since people usually aren't logical.
This kinda makes sense. Aspies tend to have high sensitivities and one would kinda expect that emotions wouldn't be much difference. High emotional sensitivity. But they would have a lot of trouble understanding and dealing with those emotions, I think? But I'm not sure. This issue really confuses me.
All research on this claims that aspies have higher affective empathy but lower cognitive empathy.
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Cinnamon and sugary
Softly Spoken lies
You never know just how you look
Through other people's eyes
Autism FAQs http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt186115.html
I guess we've worked so hard at constructing systems and analysis to give us a method to work out what other people are thinking, what is appropriate to say etc - and we've set the volume on Max as we try to somehow navigate the NT social world.
As a result we get distressed a lot, get very sensitive to others disapproval - because we are trying so hard to recognise it, we have no filters.
A poll in this forum had it at 50/50 between people who had more of each. I'd rate that as more reliable than studies that begin with a nonautistic's assumptions. Certainly, I have no affective empathy, but I can easily reason how people would feel (though if they're very unlike me obviously it's harder).
Okay, so I don't know how to explain affective or cognitive empathy. Because I'm not sure what I have. See I have empathy for fictional characters like in a book or in a RPG. But in the real world I feel nothing for someone whom broke their leg. Or I am really bad at this, but this is an example. My best friend broke his metatarsal one day. But I had simply believed him to have sprained his ankle. He was telling me how much it hurts and I told him to get over it, everyone sprains their ankle. There are other times. Such as my biological mother broke her arm or something. All I know is that I felt nothing and didn't feel her pain.
But when it comes to either fictional characters or animals I feel empathy with them.
But when it comes to either fictional characters or animals I feel empathy with them.
I'm guessing that maybe that's affective empathy, and maybe a lack of cognitive empathy keeps it from clicking IRL, but somehow that wall is over come in books and stuff. I dunno.
_________________
Cinnamon and sugary
Softly Spoken lies
You never know just how you look
Through other people's eyes
Autism FAQs http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt186115.html
But when it comes to either fictional characters or animals I feel empathy with them.
I'm guessing that maybe that's affective empathy, and maybe a lack of cognitive empathy keeps it from clicking IRL, but somehow that wall is over come in books and stuff. I dunno.
Well in books and movies they exaggerate emotion. In the real life emotion and empathy is not so easily exagerated and thus I don't get the message sometimes. It's harder for me. Or that's what I always assumed.
Cambridge University and the Autism research centre are running a test which covers this. They show a series of pictures and ask if you sympathize with them (cognitive empathy) then later they show the same pictures and ask how they affect you (affective empathy). They don't currently tell you how you scored though my affective empathy was pretty much nonexistent. In many cases I answered higher then I felt because I thought I should feel more than I did.
I contacted ARC and suggested they show the scores for the tests and received an email back from Simon Baron-Cohen saying they would look into it. If you want to take the test you can register with them as a volunteer here. They will give you a whole bunch of tests, including this one.
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I stopped fighting my inner demons. We're on the same side now.
I've talked about this in real life before. Rather than trying to differentiate between types of empathy, I referred to the concepts as sympathy (for affective empathy) and empathy (for cognitive empathy). I pointed out that the ability to care about the emotions of others is independent of the ability to understand them.
I think people need to be careful about their choice of wording when describing that symptom. While technically true (by one definition of the word, at least), saying that people with ASDs lack empathy will give most people an incorrect impression.
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If life's not beautiful without the pain,
well I'd just rather never ever even see beauty again.
Well as life gets longer, awful feels softer.
And it feels pretty soft to me.
Modest Mouse - The View
Hmm, Take a picture of a famine victim for instance. I can look at the picture and think 'it would be horrible to be in that situation'. However I don't really feel much. It is just a picture.
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I stopped fighting my inner demons. We're on the same side now.
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