What exactly is empathy and why is mine weak?

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The best I can come up with is a three-part definition of empathy: there is "knowing," "feeling," and acting appropriately.

Knowing another's emotion or mental state: When I focus appropriately, I typically don't have a problem with the knowing part; I sometimes even catch things that NT's miss; however, if other things distract me, including my own thoughts, there can be lapses there -- sometimes severe ones.

Feeling: it depends on my mood. Typically, I only feel others' emotions, such as excitement or sadness when my serotonin levels are low (I know this because, when I'm depressed, I have a higher ability to feel a variety of others' emotions, but when I take tryptophan or St. John's Wort or prescription SSRI, this ability disappears although "knowing" is unaffected).

Acting appropriately: it doesn't come naturally. Therefore, it's something I have to think about. Typically, I just copy others, or I do what I have seen others do in similar situations. Or sometimes just act based on the "feeling." Sometimes, I forget to show empathy, or is this just "sympathy"? The more I know someone, the less likely I am to demonstrate the final category.

Deep down, this breakdown may be such because, subconsciously, I have long wanted it to be so. I have long thought of caring and compassion as "weak" but thought of "knowledge" as power. I also tend to want people to like me for reasons unrelated to my caring about them as people.

Last edited by Tyri0n on 10 Apr 2013, 7:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Wasn't that you who was writing about cognitive and affective empathy on that other thread? That post seems to have been deleted, but if it was you, I think you explained the components very well. In fact, my students are studying ASDs in my psych class this week, and I think I will "borrow" your words to explain the empathy thing to them

I think I replaced them with the test because it seemed like it would be of more interest to the OP (see, empathy at work...).

Anyway, I think cognitive and affective don't fully capture the issue. There is an intermediate component: feeling.

I added the intermediate component because, often, I get knowing down and I get response down because I either imitate others or know what the other person expects/what is typically done; however, I don't actually feel sad/happy/whatever (especially happy -- I usually feel depressed when something goes well for anyone else) for the other person. I may not even care. But I care very much what this person and others think of me, so I give them what they want.

Thus, my usually situation is knowing (check) feeling (no) response (check)

Sometimes, I'll miss knowing when I'm distracted and, thus, miss the other two as well. Rarely, I will get knowing and feeling and mess up the response. This used to happen more often, but it is definitely not my predominant means of operation now.

I got a 22 on the test, BTW. I still refuse to call it low empathy...I just need other people to tell me how they are feeling, instead of expecting me to read their minds. And if they want to know how I am feeling, they need to give me a little time to process (and probably have me write it down) and I can express myself quite well. Not so good with the talking about my feelings, though, because I rarely know how I feel in the moment. I need to reflect more than most to figure that out. But I think most people would do well to reflect before saying how they feel.

Ok, so how would you characterize mine? It seems nearly the opposite in some respects.

Cognitive -- average

Affective -- low

External response -- average/low average

Well...from your posts on here, I'd say you're helpful to others in terms of providing good insight and express yourself well. Not characteristics of someone who lacks empathy as I would define it. I think that doctors are just inaccurate in their assumptions about what's going on inside our heads because we don't express it in the typical way. I think WP posters show way more empathy than most of the people who comment on FB, and presumably most of them are NT.