Email from WP to ARC request debate on WP with S.B Cohen.

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Delacoste
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04 Jan 2013, 6:35 pm

I've spent a lot of time considering empathy and have done some serious degree of research; I got a suggested diagnosis of Aspergers from a therapist who extensively deals with AS children last year, and have a nephew who is autistic, which added to my thoughts.

I have some situationally impaired empathy; I'm a sexual sadist, and can find enjoyment in the suffering of another, but only in a sexual context, only consensually and I hate the concept of injury or damage even in that context. I'm not cruel in normal situations with family, friends and strangers. I do deeply feel that for me, my distance to a subject effects my affective empathy towards someone. I don't feel grief, disgust or so on for disconnected or conflicting situations, but do for direct relationships or observations.

I am not saying AS has anything to do with my sadism (my childhood probably had a lot to do with that,) but I do have a lot of experience considering empathy.

Baron-Cohen said in his 2004 EQ paper that CE and AE were interconnected, and thus the initial paper didn't try to separate the concepts. The issue is that cognitive empathy is a filter for affective empathy, not only externally but internally too, when we consider our own affective empathy. Also, like quantum mechanics, the test can effect the result. Asking about an empathetic choice includes our own judgement in the answer, and clearly people don't *want* to be unfeeling; that's the realm of NPD and ASPD... and regardless, we DO feel.

The additional physiological testing B-C includes in his EQ testing is certainly a noble goal but they arent determinative clearly. There really aren't good ways of separating CE from AE in testing thus far.

I've read the thread here, and understand that the AS community doesn't like the idea of being labelled "empathy imparired", but there IS a reason why there are social impairments within AS beyond anxiety. Thus far, impaired ToM fits better than any other, has not been disproven and no serious competing theory has been advanced.

I don't buy the criticism that the EQ in autism study is self referential (that autistic people are empathy impared because of this test I designed and visa versa). Clearly the test is seeking an answer to help explain one of the completely obvious tennets of autism; that of social impairment.

If there is an alternate, figure out a method to test it, create a statically valid study including controls, and publish it.



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22 Jan 2013, 7:48 am

I don't think sadism between consenting adults has a whole lot to do with empathy, one way or another.

I'd probably get in trouble if I divulged personal details of marital behavior in the bedroom, but-- suffice it to say that I have some masochistic tendencies there and enjoy them greatly, but do not relish being kicked by random strangers on the street or by folks I know in everyday situations. Yeah, I don't think an S/M fetish between consenting adults says much about empathy one way or another.

I share the view that, from an AS perspective, NT communication is "inappropriate." That the NT view is just as unempathic with the AS view as vice-versa. Jennifer McIlwe Myers actually said it outright in one of her books: "That 'lack of empathy' business cuts both ways, no?"

It boils down to a culture clash. And that's really not all that heartening, when you think about how culture clashes have gone in the past.


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05 Feb 2013, 4:54 am

jojobean wrote:
e issues with empathy. My Grandfather is dying.feelfeel nothing. My mother cries about it at least once a day, I have no freaking idea how to comfort her. I want to comfort her which shows that I have empathy at some level, but it is distorted in a way from normal functioning empathy. I seem to have more emotional empathy for those who suffer who I am am not close to, but the closer I am to someone, the less emotional empathy I have. I intelectually know a person I love is suffering and try to make things better, but I feel nothing...like numbness. Maybe I actually have too much empathy and it short circuts my empathy grid. Who knows?

Jojo


Familiarity breeds contempt?

I am afraid to care for people I know well. A far-off crisis makes me grieve.
It's weird, but not uncaring.
The researchers are trying but I don't think they can 'get it'.



asp19291
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24 Feb 2013, 11:01 pm

I have a suggested term for too much empathy- empathological. Terrifying. :-)

And trust me- there are plenty of Aspies in Simon's lab!



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11 Apr 2013, 8:49 am

jojobean wrote:
Well I agree that I have some issues with empathy. My Grandfather is dying...I feel nothing. My mother cries about it at least once a day, I have no freaking idea how to comfort her. I want to comfort her which shows that I have empathy at some level, but it is distorted in a way from normal functioning empathy. I seem to have more emotional empathy for those who suffer who I am am not close to, but the closer I am to someone, the less emotional empathy I have. I intelectually know a person I love is suffering and try to make things better, but I feel nothing...like numbness. Maybe I actually have too much empathy and it short circuts my empathy grid. Who knows?
Jojo


You do have empathy, but you can´t stop a girl (your mother) mourning the loss of her dad. You can do nothing to comfort her.
You can´t make i go away. Just be there.You don´t have to say anything.
It is normal, that you seem to have more empathy for the less close, who suffer. When it is your closest family, it is harder to take in, especially, when you know, that there is nothing, you can do, no matter how badly you may want to.
I think, your numness is a very natural defence mechanism.


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BrookeWood
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17 Apr 2013, 3:12 am

Great discussion..........



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27 Apr 2013, 1:20 pm

Interesting discussion! The original letter was great & true in a lot of ways! :D

What happened? Was there a letter-writing campaign? Did the team ever respond?

My idea would have been to address the letter-writing campaign to Tony Attwood, who seems articulate from what I've read, and also seems to understand things in a wider scope than most other researchers. (Honestly, I haven't read much, but I know he's known for advocacy.) Because he genuinely seems to care about the autistic community & is accredited and a well-known name in the scientific community, a suggestion from him that Aspies help collaborate on the test would likely go further than our own suggestion. In the future, if a study like this comes up, I can't imagine Attwood would ignore a petition with thousands of signatures on it. :)

Another option is for aspies to get together & run our own study. As noted somewhere in this thread, many female aspies work in the field of psychology as it is.

If there are enough people in the field who can get together, the work is essentially run on grants. Surely, there are more than a few Aspies with a thing for psych studies, who are working in the field already. I would suggest getting them getting together to run the study & have some NTs help in a collaborative capacity. I majored in Clinical Psychology. I will tell anyone who will listen it's almost always bunk, so I'm probably not the best candidate. lol But, I would help the best I could if someone asked and am excellent at flaw-finding and thinking ahead.

With regard to that silly doll test:

-Cognitive delays in children do not necessarily indicate cognitive inabilities after these children have grown (as some of you noted!)

-Ability to know imagine what another entity can or cannot see has absolutely no bearing on anything emotional. If assumptions are to be made, they only apply to visual perspective. This study is absolutely irrelevant to empathy, because it has zero emotional application.

-If it DID have emotional application, it wouldn't still wouldn't show a lack of empathy. If a child watched a researcher hide a marble from a doll.... (I can't believe I'm actually writing this! *faceplam*)... it is likely that an "over-empathizer" or anyone who just liked fairness in general, would have the doll look where the marble was, so the doll would find it. Hiding the marble is dirty pool. I think lots of Aspies, since we tend to like our stuff in predictable places, would get that. It's obviously a game, since it's a doll. We control pretend games. If the researcher puts a child in control of the outcome in a pretend game by asking where the doll will look, why wouldn't any child not have the doll find the marble? That doesn't even make sense. Wouldn't having a doll look in the wrong place demonstrate a lack of emotional empathy and even perhaps an inability to recognize the situation would have been unjust?

-I'd like to see a group of children known for bullying take this test & see what comes of it. I think we'd find that children unable to care about the feelings or physical safety of other children will get the answers that "prove" they have "empathy" when they clearly don't. I'm pretty sure this test would be invalidated & that would be great. :)


Some thoughts on empathy
:

I believe the people here who say they don't have empathy. I also believe true empathy- actually knowing what another person is going through- is a physical impossibility. I think most Aspies understand that, and most NT's don't, because they aren't as literal. I think most Aspie's understand the closest anyone can get is imagining themselves in a situation another person is in. That isn't knowing what that person, with that person's personality/pain tolerance/life history would experience. We could try to guess, but we don't know. I think we use the word know differently than NT's. It's crazy for them to think they could really know what anyone else feels & thinks, too! If they aren't telepathic, they do not know... the same as us! ;) Maybe they guess correctly more often, because the world has more NTs in it! Maybe if they were trying to empathize with someone who wasn't a lot like them, they'd get it wrong, too. Honestly, I think whoever writes & analyzes the EQ type questions are less literal, so they don't really understand how an Aspie would analyze these concepts. But, in watching NT behavior, I absolutely see no more proof of actual empathy than the man in the moon... If empathy is a trait most humans have, I'm pretty sure human history wouldn't be rife of things like slavery, war, & genocide. I think it should be proven that NTs have it, if that is the case, before anyone even suggests that anyone with autism does not.

It seems to me people with autism can have no "empathy," ever or an overwhelming amount of it, always, or be somewhere in between or flip between the two. In insisting some of us have it, we shouldn't insist all of us do or that all of us should. If some people don't, it doesn't mean they are monsters. It only means they don't have empathy. :)

Personally, I'd like to see an acknowledgement that we may or may not have it.

(Sorry for any typos. I'm outside, & the glare on the screen is pretty bad.)



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14 Jun 2013, 12:01 am

Wow, fascinated by this thread. There's an ARC opening about 15 mins away from me in August, which I believe is where SBC will be based.

I haven't read his work yet ( *another* thing for the "to do" list, sigh) but I'm fascinated by the debate going on here about empathy.

Seen quite a few complaints in postings about the AS = no empathy thing, and got an insistent thought nagging at me.....

I've been told that I have a lot of empathy, I've always had trouble expressing my OWN feelings. I've seen mention on this thread of childhood experience.... seems MANY of us suffer at the hands of our NT peers in childhood, which is going to put you off people - it did me until I learned (eventually) that a few people ARE worth knowing.

I believe there'e a possibility that the NT allegation of "no empathy" is actually comprised part projection ( we're the smaller group and we're different, ergo we're the "wrong" ones) on the part of NTs because they do not empathise in the same way as us.

I see news of a terrorist attack on TV, couldn't give a s**t. I grew up in and around London in the 70s and 80s, sit on the top deck of a bus in case of a car bomb, sit in the middle of a train in case of crashes, always make sure you can see the exit and have your back to a wall in a closed public space. I see much of terrorism as hypocrisy, both on the part of those who perpetrate it, and the governments who fund it for years and then bleat because it comes to their own back yard. I hear of an incident, and as long as Me and Mine aren't involved, it's "meh".

Having someone I have a familial, emotional or social bond with emotionally upset is extremely distressing for me, because I want to provide comfort but don't know how.

Watching an underdog get bullied raises emotion in me, but watching a bully get bullied is just an event.

Can't watch adverts with suffering kids - literally - but I think that's more due to my "nurture" than my nature.

"Empathy" towards my social group, now that's an interesting one. Let's say I spent 99% of my formative years having my life made hell by my "peers", do I really give two flying turds if something really nasty happens to one, or indeed all of them? Would I, as a teenager, have been quietly relieved if a certain number of people at my school went over a cliff in a bus? - Yes, I would. Would the treatment I received at their hands drive me to an essentially emotionless state as a defence mechanism? You betcha! Would all those ignorant scumbag bullies regard me as weird in that respect because it doesn't meet THEIR societal norm? You do the psychological math......

Would "society" be able to look at a 1% proportion of itself and say "WE caused this in these people by the way we treated them"? No, of course it wouldn't because the group mind would not countenance a flaw within itself, represented by the majority, when it could say that the minority are not "normal", thus absolving itself of guilt and rationalising it's treatment of us during our development - a typical NT trait, rationalising bad behaviour/

We're basically just bald monkeys. "Drive out the outsider". Just so happens that they created the outsiders. Tough break.

The failure to involve and engage with us properly in research is more likely to be economically driven. "Big Pharma" just wants categorisable ( is that a word?) drug applications to sell their products. Big Business has started recognising the value of an AS brain, and will want our more perceived negative traits damped down so that we're more productive. Our monetisation has begun........

OK, paranoid fantasy, maybe, but I've learned that there is no manipulation, lie, atrocity or deception beyond the pale for society at large if they can come to a consensus that it is ultimately profitable in some way. We are on the way to becoming a commodity. Would you want to engage emotionally with the animal you're going to eat, metaphorically speaking? If we demand that we are recognised as a societal group rather than a defective commodity then the business world will have to pay more for us and our abilities than you can bet they are planning to.

We should send a letter a WEEK!, not a month. We should send individual letters, and we should maybe petition the "accepted interface" representatives of the AS community that have made it into the mainstream, like Temple Grandin, et al. to further promote awareness of us as people. If we are going to ask someone to speak for us, it should be one of our own, and ultimately NO research conclusion can be ratified without the input of the AS community it claims to quantify if it's going to try and tell us what/how we think/feel.

Everyone should write their own letters, in whatever style they choose, whether light, serious, whimsical or angry. We're unique individuals, just like everyone else! Ignore what you think they might want to hear and say what you want to tell! Flood every research centre with letters saying "I'm human, why won't you hear my voice?"

Just realised how long this post is getting and that I'm getting a bit random, so I'll stop for now :wink:


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14 Jun 2013, 8:26 am

I was irritated by some of SBCs comments about empathy when I first encountered them. I felt they were an ignorant, dehumanizing attack on me and people I love.

Then I read more about it and see the thinking is more complicated.

I had this moment the other day when I was talking with my wife and she told me, "you're supposed to say something sympathetic now. That's what I need to hear. If you talk about something else, it seems like you don't care." I was appalled. I care deeply--but apparently it wasn't showing. I think this is part of what SBC is talking about.

I saw an interview with him in "Loving Lamposts" and he was very sympathetic.



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23 Jun 2013, 2:50 pm

While SBC EQ-test has good relation to neurodiversity and ASD, it doesn't have much or anything to do with empathy as it is typically interpreted. His questions instead correlates with social and communication preferences of NTs, not with empathy.



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26 Jun 2013, 8:01 pm

rdos wrote:
While SBC EQ-test has good relation to neurodiversity and ASD, it doesn't have much or anything to do with empathy as it is typically interpreted. His questions instead correlates with social and communication preferences of NTs, not with empathy.


Good point. My wife is the empathic person I have ever met, and she scores 32.


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02 Aug 2013, 6:45 pm

I rejected being autistic for many years because of the supposed lack of empathy that autistics possess. I cannot stand to see anyone suffering and feel COMPELLED to alleviate it in any way I can. I live in a travel trailer in the mountains of Colorado. To be specific it is a nudist resort, Mountain air Ranch. We run the ice cream shop[ONLY nudist club in the U.S to have an operating ice cream parlor] and I always leave the door unlocked so that if we're not there people can help themselves to ice cream or toothpaste or sunscreen, aVON products, homemade jewelry[ we also are a bit of a mercantile] they can. If they want to, they can leave money in the tip jar but we have made it clear that if they need or want something but don't have the money to just take it and pay it forward. Some people here have more money than God, and others [mostly fellow auties, no clothing in a quiet place in the mountains is awesome] have very little. I cannot stand the idea of someone going without merely because they have less money.

When we go to Denver we always bring a stack of dollar bills, ussually homemade cookies and small AVON toiletries as well, to hand out to the homeless downtown. At night I am haunted by their suffering and so grateful to help them even if it gives them only minutes or even seconds of relief from their pain. When we forget to bring money, or we have none, I feel anguish every time we pass a homeless person and cannot give.

when someone I know, or know of is hurting, I so want to help. i get terribly confused as how to best help. I am sure I usually don't say the "right" thing. I mean i'll be the first to bake the ham, clean their place or take care of the kids or animals during their crisis but I do not have a clue, not even an inkling of the right thing to say to comfort them, whether I am supposed to hug them or whatever. but I do care...so much.

So i guess that makes me less empathetic. But wait! I sure cry and feel enormous suffering when our country decides to invade a less powerful nation and destroys their infrastructure and kills their babies and people[ah, collateral damage, and everyone knows that a person who is defending their family or nation in a third world country is a terrorist, right?]

From my perspective, that is anything but empathy. Dehumanizing, even demonizing innocent people is the OPPOSITE of empathy. Finding excuses not to help people who are feeling pain is the OPPOSITE of empathy, but then so is accusing anyone who is creatively wired of being merely an empty shell incapable of experiencing true empathy.



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14 Nov 2013, 6:20 am

i've unstickied this thread. It hasn't been updated since september.


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