People with autism can't feel other people's feelings.

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16 years at the same company.

i do have trouble sensing other people's emotions. They have to be stronger emotions for me to pick them up without being told. But to say I can't feel other peoples emotions is a big overstatement.


So if a NT is so good at picking up others emotions, lets say they're around a mad person, a sad person and a happy person at the same time, what does that make the NT feel? Some sort of bipolar disorder?

In a selfish way, a lack of empathy would be a good thing, but if someone was taking a bunch of drugs next to you, I imagine empathy would be fun! I wonder if that's this 'contact high' I hear about...

I can actaully sense other peoples feelings.......I can feel if someone is sad, angry, mad, content ect, with my extra sensory perception or whatever you would call it. so ha. Now if I tried relying on things I don't pick up on too well like body language and facial expressions then it might be more difficult.

But yeah when I was a kid I could come home from school and when I walked into the house I could instantly tell if my parents had been arguing or not because I could sense the tension.

But you can feel what another person is feeling if you let yourself.

I can be like an emotional sponge and absorb peoples feelings, which I like to avoid doing when I am emotionally drained myself or very tired as if they are negative feelings they are very heavy and energy draining.

Have you ever walked into a room where two people have been arguing and felt that the atmosphere was so heavy that you could almost 'cut it with a knife'? I used to be able to sense what mood my mother was in on arriving home without even seeing her, just by opening the door to the hallway. If she was in a bad mood the negative energy would hit me, if not the atmosphere would be much lighter and much more pleasant.

I can't read people feelings so much by looking at their body language (not consciously anyway), I more sense the energy they are giving out. In the same way that I can sense atmospheric pressure changes before a storm (I usually know one is coming before it gets here).

(On a side note, Electromagnetic energy has been shown to have an effect on peoples temporal lobes so as to induce feelings of there being someone around or someone watching them...even if there is no one there. Some people can be sensitive to energy fields and the changes that occur within them and as humans are a mass of electrical impulses it would not surprise me if we could be sensitive to another person's energy field as well).

And back from the side note:

Ie that is how I managed to get 20 out of 20 when it comes to spotting a fake smile on the BBC test. Most people are not good at spotting a fake smile and at the end of the test it asked you which facial features you looked at to help you. My answer was none. What I had done was gone by which smiles I had found myself automatically smiling back at (or mirroring) and clicked those as genuine smiles. The ones I did not smile back at I clicked as fake.

A genuine smile also has an essence of warmth to it that a fake smile does not have.

But if someone asked me to directly interpret body language....I can't always do it. I need to 'sense' a persons energy or vibe to get a feel for them. Now if I listen to my 'intuition' in regards to what I am 'sensing' I am rarely wrong about people. If I stop to analyse I get it wrong most of the time. The problem with me is that I never used to heed my intuition or trust it because its not based on science....it is based on a 'sense of knowing' or a 'feeling'.

I wish I had listened to my intuition in the past as it was rarely wrong and it has other functions than sensing another person's mood and picking up on their feelings. Lets just say I could have avoided a few bad events in my life if I had paid attention to my 'intuition'. I could kick myself sometimes because I saw stuff coming and I ignored it. I don't argue the point though as I cannot prove the intuitions and dreams were not coincidence.

However I am not psychic as I cannot predict other peoples futures, call it up at will or read tarot cards. Either my intuition is there or it is not and it usually relates to my own life.

But via the same mechanism I can feel what someone else is feeling 'if' I tune into it. Most of the time though I block it out as I am having a rough time of my own emotionally at the moment and I cannot carry everyone elses baggage. I am too tired so I shut it off on purpose and block it out.

This is why I am not always sure if I have an ASD. I cannot read body language, when I try to analyse it I get confused lol, but when I am open to it and willing to actually listen to my senses, I can pick up on things with scary accuracy (I can even sense when someone is about to pass away, even if it is 'unexpected'. I usually know and I have never been wrong unfortunately ). Although it is harder when I am stressed or highly anxious as the 'intuition' cannot get through anyway. My mind is too crowded and it just can't get any brain space lol.

I could kick myself cause every time I trusted someone I shouldn't because I went with my logical/analytical mind whilst my gut instinct was screaming at me and I ignored it. I may just be a very stupid NT who gets a bit confused because I am too busy trying to read body language analytically rather than just letting myself calmly feel things lol.

I have ASD traits but I also have NT traits so it is confusing at the moment. Unless there are other people out there with an ASD who can sense things?

Anyway, my personality is overly trusting, but my gut instinct is spot on. I really should pay more attention to it than my naive overly trusting nature.

The one makes me highly gullible the other highly perceptive.

Social Skills is more complex than just feeling people's emotions.

You have to know what the feeling you are picking up means based on the context which means piecing it together with the person's language, verbal and nonverbal.

It's the task-juggling that's hard. There's been plenty of times when I've overfocused on other people's emotions often happening in ways other people couldn't notice.

I once took "open up more" as meaning "open yourself up more to other people's emotions". I couldn't tell if compared to others I was being more open to feeling other people's emotions or not. Now I know I was already empathically oversensitive, which sometimes can contribute to social skills problems because people become overwhelming. I knew I was having trouble understanding other people, so I took the advice. I wound up "opening up" in that way but not in the way that was meant of talking and interacting more with other people. In fact I clammed up more because if I noticed someone was having negative emotions I felt them even more strongly.

I can feel that way but personally I don't think it's ESP. I'm a skeptic when it comes to that kind of stuff. I'm pretty sure what I pick up on are other indicators... like noticing an unusual silence or listening to the way someone moves and feeling like it's off. I definitely notice speech patterns and tone of voice as well. But it doesn't really matter what it is, I can't tune it out because I'm always subconsciously on alert if I'm already feeling tense myself.

I took me a very long time to understand other people felt pain in the same way I did. Sometimes when in a very sensory chaotic, crowded area, I will sometimes overlook someone's pain.

I've always picked up emotions as a negative force making me feel confused, scared and angry.

Sometimes stereotypes are there for a reason. It doesn't always relate to you but there's some of us they apply to.


I mean obviously this person is a troll but disregarding a trait because you don't have it is just foolish.

When you were kids did you have this much over empathy/ sensing emotions in others? Because I can tell you, if you weren't an animated Disney lion or one of the Disney wolves, or my own cat, I'd feel very little for you.

Non autistics are constantly pegging us based on their own superficial cue dictionaries in their minds.

You're looking at my face, you're not seeing me from the inside.

When I am withdrawing in an environment, sometimes it is because the emotions of others have too much impact on me.

The thread title is right to me.

I can cognitively understand that someone is feeling bad due to various pointers (words being the best one, of course), but I don't feel them like how others do.

I have to figure it out in other words, and then I don't get emotional unless there's some form of experience that connects me to it (sympathy).

Well NTs can't have much empathy when they stare at me all the time. If they had empathy, they would think, ''oh I shouldn't stare at this girl, because a) staring is inappropriate, b) I don't even know this girl, c) she's not exactly doing anything unusual or different to make me stare, d) she's not even looking at me, and e) staring might make her feel uncomfortable because it does me.''

Answer that, people!

Along with the grammar.

For me, the exact opposite is true. I know exactly how people are feeling, even if they think they're concealing their emotions. I may not know why they are feeling that way (I'm not psychic). Knowing that someone was annoyed with me or had taken a dislike to me, but not knowing the reason why, has been a major issue all my life. Sometimes, when I've found out their reason, it hasn't made sense at all, or quite often it has been due to misplaced jealousy (which I'll never understand).

If people stare at me I am tempted to do something weird just to give them something to stare at lolololololololol. Next time I might start picking my nose or something.

I don't really stare at people or even notice people staring at me actually as I tend to look at everything else around me except other human beings ie the floor, the bush, the tree, the flower, the car going past, the cat in the corner....either that or I am too lost in my own head to spot them....oopps I seem to have smashed into someone cause I didn't see them coming. I make a quick apology and carry on in my own way which is mostly oblivious lol.

I would make an awful eye witness...

"So miss Bumble, the perpetrator was walking down the road in the opposite direction to you and walked straight past you after committing the crime, could you give me a brief description please....?"

"Well, Mr Officer Sir, I think, and I cannot be sure, that he or she was wearing black shoes. However I also saw someone walk past in trainers so that could have been them".

"Can you tell me what sex they were"

"I have no Idea officer as I was looking at the floor and the pretty flowers in the garden over there. I keep meaning to do something with my own garden and I was lost in thought wondering if that particular plant would grow well in a shady area that does not get much sunlight. Either that or I was considering finding some space to grow some fruit maybe....I am not sure, what do you think would be best?"

"EErrrrr I have no idea Miss. *Ahem*. So you have no idea what sex they were?"

"No"

"Any idea what they were wearing?"

"Trainers or black shoes"

"Anything else"

"No"

"Ok next eye witness please...."

if empathy means what i think it does (i know the dictionary definition), then i do not feel it.

i remember my psychiatrist telling my parents that i had no empathy and they were upset, but she also said it did not mean that i do not care.

some examples of where i am aware of my lack of empathy:

when everyone is watching a football match and their side wins, they all seem to feed off each other and they look around at everyone's faces to see how everyone else feels. they are caught up in a general public mood, and everyone pats and hugs each other and they are all "united" in euphoria. i feel nothing (not just because i have no interest in sport), and i remain entirely unaffected and consider their raucousness annoying. there have been times where the whole tavern (where i used to dine) were elated, and when someone sees me scribbling stuff on paper or doing the crosswords with no expression, they become hostile.

i have no idea why people cry at weddings. my parents tried to explain that is it because they are happy. well then the question becomes "why do people cry when they are happy ?". they gave the explanation that "people can get overly emotional, and it results in tears of joy". well then the question becomes "why would they become overwhelmed by being happy, and why does that produce tears ?".....eventually they had to resort to saying "they just do". i am left no closer to an answer.

even the act of smiling when happy is mysterious to me. i smile when i find something funny, or when i am being tickled. when i am happy, my face remains blank. it takes muscular effort to smile, and i can not see how people can wear smiles all day by default.

i am not influenced to smile when someone who is looking at me smiles. i can see that they are smiling and that is all i see. my facial expression does not subconsciously adapt to the circumstance as most people's facial expressions do.

i see people talking to each other, and it is baffling to me how they pull faces to mimic each other. for example: if someone is talking on a phone, and is being watched by the person who they were talking to before the phone rang, then if the person's (on the phone) facial expression changes without them saying anything that would explain why, the person they were previously talking to in real life will change their expression on their face to match, even though they have no idea what is being said.

i have been taught what facial expressions mean, but that is as far as it goes. even then i can not distinguish subtleties. an example of that (sorry i almost always cram examples into my posts) would be that i can not distinguish between an angry smile and a normal smile.

some people smile at other people in angry contempt. i can not discern the difference between aggressive hostile smiles from natural happy smiles.

whatever, i am not like all of you who are empathic to a heightened degree. i do not belong in this thread. i am probably going to be categorized as a non asperger syndrome person by people who believe they have AS, and they will say that i do not fit the requirements for AS by their erroneous standards.

i am different to most of you people in that i can not carry on a conversation for very long.


i will never feel what goes on in other peoples heads.

Well its technically probably not ESP, I just did not know what else to call it....but yeah this is a bit more then sensing unusual silence or noticing any physical signs that things are off. Its the same thing with the weather when I can sense a storm coming its like for whatever reason I am sensative to the energies around me and people also give off energy I can sense. Its quite difficult to explain but its just as real to me as all my normal senses like hearing, seeing, tasting ect.

and should I mention in that example I gave......I would walk into the house and my parents could be in the other room where I could not see them and I could still feel it so that's how I know I could not have been picking up on silence or body language.

I guess I don't really know. Not trying to shoot down your experience, it's just that as a skeptical/scientific minded person I have trouble believing stuff that doesn't have a whole lot of evidence in my opinion. I've also had intuitions of the kind before that I would have a hard time explaining though. I can't completely rule something out. It just seems more likely that there are clues based on ordinary senses or reasoning that we just aren't consciously aware of.

I know when a summer storm is coming there's often a sudden increase in humidity. That's usually the most noticeable thing before a thunderstorm. With thunderstorms there can also be a lot of rapid small fluctuations in atmospheric pressure due to a thing called gravity waves which are like ripples on a pond when you drop a rock into it. Then there are changes in the electrical charge. I think it's a possibility for humans to subconsciously pick up on any of these things without even knowing it.