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Bluefins
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30 Nov 2010, 10:29 pm

ediself wrote:
well, how is it called when someone breaks their leg in front of you and you can feel the pain? i can feel pain through a story told over the phone... is that empathy? i'm not sure about the emotions, as i sometimes doubt that people feel them as strongly as they express them, but physical pain is contagious to me.

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.
theexternvoid wrote:
Sounds like my definition of empathy is off. Cognitive empathy is something that just happens intuitively in NTs?

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.



Kon
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30 Nov 2010, 11:28 pm

Bluefins wrote:
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.


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.



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13 Mar 2012, 11:40 am

I think this makes a lot of sense. I feel that I am more affected by other people's troubles than NT's are.



Ganondox
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13 Mar 2012, 11:59 am

All research on this claims that aspies have higher affective empathy but lower cognitive empathy.


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13 Mar 2012, 12:04 pm

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.



fraac
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13 Mar 2012, 12:06 pm

Ganondox wrote:
All research on this claims that aspies have higher affective empathy but lower cognitive empathy.


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).



lostgirl1986
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13 Mar 2012, 12:07 pm

I think it's different with every aspie. I can feel empathy but I'll admit it's lower than most peoples. It also depends what kind of situation and the people I'm around. To be honest I usually feel more empathy for animals than humans.



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13 Mar 2012, 12:34 pm

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.



Ganondox
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13 Mar 2012, 1:07 pm

Pandora_Box wrote:
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.



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.


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Pandora_Box
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13 Mar 2012, 4:49 pm

Ganondox wrote:
Pandora_Box wrote:
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.



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.



RazorEddie
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14 Mar 2012, 4:14 am

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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mds_02
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14 Mar 2012, 5:43 am

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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fraac
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14 Mar 2012, 6:43 am

RazorEddie wrote:
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).


Wouldn't cognitive empathy be if you could imagine what they were feeling?



RazorEddie
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14 Mar 2012, 12:54 pm

fraac wrote:
Wouldn't cognitive empathy be if you could imagine what they were feeling?


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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fraac
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14 Mar 2012, 1:22 pm

So you don't have affective empathy. I think the terms are frequenty misused and 'empathy' is largely BS but also I think you're confused on this.



RazorEddie
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14 Mar 2012, 2:43 pm

Well, I said I didn't have much affective empathy so why am I confused?


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