Cognitive empathy vs. emotional/affective empathy

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When I posted that empathy quotient quiz before, I and others realised that it lacked a distinction between cognitive and emotional or "affective" empathy, so I thought I'd do a poll on it since I'm curious as to what type of empathy most Aspies tend to lack.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to recognise what other people are thinking. It is also possible that this lets you know how they feel, or what mood they're in, but it does not allow you to actually feel their emotion.

Emotional/affective empathy is perhaps the more traditionally known sense of the term - it's what allows people to feel the emotions of others and want to help them if those emotions are negative.

The question is, which form of empathy do you have the most of?

Emotional empathy.

I did have to tune it down or turn it off at times though as if I did detect what mood someone was in I would feel their pain so intensely it could overwhelm me, especially if I am in a state of emotional turmoil myself.

I think this is a very good point. We might have a different type of empathy from 'average.'

Mine seems to be more cognitive than emotional. I don't know if I'd describe it as knowing what others are thinking. More like I can intellectually understand what they are feeling. I just don't let myself feel it, unless it is someone I'm infatuated with or in love with, then my emotional empathy skyrockets.

I have abnormally weak cognitive empathy and abnormally strong affective empathy.

Higher affective empathy and lower cognitive empathy makes it so you screw up all the time and then feel really bad about it.

I think for the most part I have more congnitive. I seem to have really good intuition for understanding where other's are coming from, can see both sides of a situation or argument very easily. I've been told by my therapist that my sense for this is way above normal. She used to joke that I'm above most of her collegues in this area, if only I could make it through school, which she know's me well enough to know there's no way, I'd make an excellent therapist. What a cruel joke and twist of fate that is. I've actually had two therapists say this to me, maybe I should just hang a shingle and state, no formal training, just life training and strong intution available for mediation. LOL

But I don't get emotionally attached or effected by it, so it actually makes me a great mediator for friends because I can stay neutral about a situation. And it's not that I don't care, I just see both sides so clearly that I can see the solution so matter of factly that there isn't a need to get emotional or upset by it because there's really no problem here. I guess it's lucky to be in that place of not being 'stuck' in the confusion of the situation. However it can make me appear very cold and uncaring to the people who are stuck in the emotion of it, i've learned that I have to take care to remind myself that they have pain around this and can't see the solution as clearly as I can. So I've trained myself to take it slow and have patience while they work through to the understanding that I've seen all along.

But if I do see someone I care about in massive pain I will feel it and cry. Like when my grandpa died and I saw my aunt so massivly distraught, I was so struck by her intense pain that I felt a little and cried for her. But it does take a lot for me to get that much feeling of it.

But I can feel my own pain, which is usually deep sorrow for missed opportunity. Like after I put my son to bed, sometimes I'll just cry wondering if I did as much as I could during the day to let him know he's loved and not alone in this world. I don't know where that falls into this subject, but that's when I 'feel' the most emotion.

hi there,

this differentiation between affective and cognitive empathy still confuses me. In my opinion empathy is more a feeling, and such a thing as "cognitive empathy" is just a necessary condition to have empathy.

In short, I think cognitive and affective empathy can't be really separated, they belong together.

In order to feel for someone else, you always need to recognize his inner state, which is not obvious, it needs to be detected, you have to recognize his body expressions etc, you have to know his life situation to get why and how he might be happy or not happy now (cognitive empathy).

The feeling which results by knowing this, is a pain or a happyness, its no logical thing, not a matter of true or false, its feelings (affective empathy)

I think the term "cognitive empathy" is misleading, it supposes that there can be a "cognitive empathy" without a "affective empathy", but I see rather the former one as a condition for the later one.

Anyone gets what I wanted to say??

best regards,

anton

This version of empathy a lot of us are talking about, where we understand how people relate to each other in a way they often don't understand themselves, this doesn't get discussed in the mainstream. I know that Simon Baron-Cohen has declared that you can't 'systemise' an understanding of people, but that's evidently exactly what many of us have done.

I agree with the cognitive empathizers above. I understand thought processes and, to some extent emotions, in others. I can see their logical quirks and fallacies, but I am very objective and removed from the emotional (affective empathy). I think this comes from a lifetime of studying others and myself. It does make me a good person to talk to about problems sometimes.

I can't remember ever being emotionally affected by another. If two of us are sad about the same thing, it's because I'm sad independently of the other, not because I've taken their sadness on. In fact, I've often tried to take on the emotions of others, to emotionally "walk in their boots", but I've never been successful.

I've found it difficult in situations where everyone around me is crying (graduations or funerals), but I can elicit that emotion. In those situations, I wish to comfort people, but usually I'll do a very poor job if I try. I think the problem I've run into is that sometimes others have "just emotions" without any cognitive basis for them. It's as if there doesn't have to be a reason for the way they feel. I always know the reason for the way I feel. Therefore when I try to help in these situations of "just emotions", I have very little comprehension of what is actually going on.