Cognitive empathy vs. emotional/affective empathy

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Which form of empathy do you have the most of?
Cognitive empathy 40%  40%  [ 38 ]
Emotional/affective empathy 38%  38%  [ 36 ]
I feel I lack both 15%  15%  [ 14 ]
I feel I have a normal amount of both 2%  2%  [ 2 ]
Other (please explain) 4%  4%  [ 4 ]
Total votes : 94

Tambourine-Man
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02 Jan 2012, 8:02 pm

I have strong cognitive empathy, but often very poor affective empathy. When someone else is feeling sad or happy or angry, I don't feel any different, aside from a possible increase in anxiety. I don't catch emotions from other people. Emotions are like yawns for NTs - they're contagious.


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anneurysm
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02 Jan 2012, 8:47 pm

I have emotional empathy for my family and inner circle of friends only...but likely not as much as other people do.
I also have it for people who are disadvantaged, such as people in poor countries. I cant even think about these people without wanting to tear up...same with abused animals. Animals in general too, I feel for them more than I do for people.
But for everyone else....not really, since I do not have a personal connection to them.


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dr01dguy
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03 Jan 2012, 1:08 am

cognitive empathy -- If somebody is crying with visible tears, I know they're sad or upset about something. If somebody is smiling & laughing, I know they're happy. Just about everything else is a complete mystery, and mainly just kind of stresses me out. Likewise, if somebody's "over the top", I can never really tell whether they're genuinely overwhelmed by emotion, or just being a drama queen (and my usual reaction is to coldly write them off as a drama queen, absent overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

Case in point: a few years ago, my best friend (whom I lived with) came in the front door wailing with grief that his dog was dead (she saw a cat, ran after it, and got hit by a car). He was upset and screaming, but wasn't visibly crying (yet). I looked at his dog (being carried), and she looked fine. Her eyes were open, and she didn't have any visible injuries. I had to study her for about 10 seconds to convince myself that she wasn't breathing and was dead, and my friend was completely traumatized because I couldn't take his word for it and immediately empathize, and had to independently confirm for myself that his dog was dead (the fact that she died doing something that met with my vehement and overwhelming disapproval made it harder to empathize with my friend over her death).

affective empathy -- if it's somebody I have a personal connection with, and they're having a crisis, they're likely to become my dominant special interest for at least a day or two. If I end up being helpless to do anything to help them, it's likely to quickly burn out and evolve into pleasure-free detached schadenfreude. I went through this multiple times due to a close friend's drug problem (crack, in particular) -- days of crisis, coming to a head when I'd finally have a meltdown and go home crying because it sank in that there was nothing I could do to make him stop doing it. I went through this multiple times, over the span of several months, before he got scared sufficiently straight to quit smoking crack, and went back to spending his days stoned & drunk instead (still bad, but just about *anything* is an improvement over crack).

If it's an anonymous stranger, I don't really feel anything unless pets (especially cats) are involved. I cried when I read in the paper about a man who was taken away by an ambulance & had his dog euthanized by the animal shelter while he was in a coma for two weeks. I was in absolute despair for weeks about the pet holocaust in post-Katrina New Orleans, and actually got kind of depressed about it.

I can also be horribly selfish by NT standards. A few years earlier, my best friend accidentally ran over his dog (she escaped from the back yard, then saw him and ran under his car to hide when she saw him because she knew he'd punish her for escaping). His screams woke me up, and the moment I realized what happened, I *had* to find my kitty, right there and then, and reassure myself that he was safe. Only then could I react to my friend's grief by throwing up on the driveway in horror as his dog died. I had a meltdown, and had to retreat to my bedroom and hug my kitty for a few hours. Intellectually, I knew my friend needed consolation, but I was too overwhelmed & just couldn't leave the room at that point.


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Last edited by dr01dguy on 03 Jan 2012, 8:15 am, edited 6 times in total.

artrat
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03 Jan 2012, 2:09 am

It is hard for me to understand cognitive empathy. It seems very cold but I don't fully understand it.
Does cognitive empathy mean that you feel no emotions when experiencing empathy?

When I feel empathy it is very emotional experience. When I see someone that is hurt or depressed I feel depressed too.
Sometimes it is hard for me to read facial expression and know how a person is feeling but when I know that the person is hurt I am consumed with emotions.


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03 Jan 2012, 5:43 am

My cognitive empathy is much stronger. I can recognise others' suffering, but I don't really feel it.

But, I do feel injustice. I sometimes have an emotional response watching people recounting the loss of their families in episodes of Air Crash Investigations (Mayday in the US) because people don't deserve to lose their families because an airline wanted to nickel-and-dime their maintenance and not grease a jackscrew, etc. Maybe it's just normal affective empathy, I don't know.



whalewatcher
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03 Jan 2012, 5:55 am

I put emotional/affective.

I believe I can tell something's up with someone, but I can't tell why. I often interpret it as my having offended them in some way, although this often turns out not to be the case.

This leads me to some wrong assumptions. Usually caution makes me avoid involvement, for fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.

This makes me seem insensitive, but it's actually a sort of self-defence.

If you sense someone's emotion, but can't analyse it, it just seems like dangerous radiation, amorphous and volatile.



AardvarkGoodSwimmer
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03 Jan 2012, 2:29 pm

anneurysm wrote:
I have emotional empathy for my family and inner circle of friends only...but likely not as much as other people do.
I also have it for people who are disadvantaged, such as people in poor countries. I cant even think about these people without wanting to tear up...same with abused animals. Animals in general too, I feel for them more than I do for people. . .

Somewhat my experience. I think I have a lower wall between me and strangers than most people do.

This makes me a more effective activist. I did better at H&R Block because I really cared about my clients (unethical company because they don't want you to really disclose negatives of bank products, well I did disclosed, and combined with one other company was fired 1 year out of 4). Feeling for others also makes me more successful as artist and writer.

And I think I'm getting better at feel and texture, when to do this. And medium step by medium step.

And I like animals, too. :D And find them much more direct than people.



Ataraxis
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15 May 2012, 3:16 am

artrat wrote:
It is hard for me to understand cognitive empathy. It seems very cold but I don't fully understand it.
Does cognitive empathy mean that you feel no emotions when experiencing empathy?

When I feel empathy it is very emotional experience. When I see someone that is hurt or depressed I feel depressed too.
Sometimes it is hard for me to read facial expression and know how a person is feeling but when I know that the person is hurt I am consumed with emotions.


I'm in the cognitive empathy category. The only time I'm at all in the affective category is if the circumstances involved would trigger the same response in me, which I'm not sure is actual empathy. For instance, crying family members tends to make me feel mostly just awkward and unsure what to do, I see the grief or anger but I don't quite get why it is so strong when there are logical things that can be done to help ameliorate the situation. But in the case of the death of my grandfather, I felt his loss at the same time they did and could understand why and how they felt the way they did, but I think it was only due to my experiencing the same types of feelings myself.

Another recent situation involved a friend of mine crying because her relationship was dissolving and she didn't want it to, she felt she still loved him and wanted him to stay. I still can't understand why she felt that way since she'd been complaining to me about problems in the relationship for quite a while and the only reason it had lasted as long as it did was because he had gotten her pregnant. So there I am, sitting on a couch next to her as she's sobbing hysterically, and I'm trying to think of bits of helpful advice on how she can progress in her life at this point, while also trying to think of strategies to distract her from the intensity of her grief without seeming to, as I've come to understand most people find it insensitive to try to change the subject on such an intense issue that quickly. As a cognitive empathy person, I see her distress, I vaguely understand the reasons for it, but I can't help but focus my efforts on trying to get her to stop feeling the way she does about it at that present time. I can't put myself in her shoes because the logical part of me tells me constantly that if I had a partner who treated me as poorly as her boyfriend did her, I would have ended the relationship myself, not clung to some delusion that he could change as my friend did. I suppose that could be considered cold by some people, but it's not intentional on my part. Luckily she has known me since we were in high school together and knows how I am when it comes to emotional things like that. I think she may have been seeking that kind of detachment and that was why she called me up to help console her at that time. I got her talking about what she'd be doing if she had to move, tried to talk her into returning to school for a degree, and even got a laugh or two out of her towards the end. She knew not to expect me to cry with her or hold her while she cried as everyone in my life knows I don't like being touched. (When I was in high school they called me "Don't-Touch-Me-Matt" because of my total aversion to things like hugs or people standing or sitting too near me.)

So to someone looking at it from an emotional viewpoint, it may seem cold. But since the people in my life are realistic about what to expect from me, it doesn't cause a problem, they even contact me sometimes specifically because I stay emotional detached from their scenarios and can give plausible, helpful advice when they can only see the issues bothering them. Don't get me wrong, I can be a very emotional person, sometimes completely irrationally so with massive mood swings to the extent that one nurse practitioner I saw thought I might be bipolar. But when I'm not personally riding a chaotic wave of neurochemicals or whatever triggers my emotional outbursts, I tend to look at things like that rather clinically. One of my special interests has always been psychology, why people do what they do, particularly abnormal psychology. I may not be able to truly understand all aspects of these things, but I accept that the people I read do, from both their own experiences and the research they do to achieve their findings. And from that I can build up a picture of how certain events cause certain reactions and understand the kind of cascade effect that emotional problems can cause and sometimes how to divert them. Just because I don't feel what they feel doesn't mean I don't care, I try to help in my own way and the people in my life understand that, and hopefully, appreciate it.


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Ai_Ling
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15 May 2012, 4:05 am

I feel like I have low levels of both. Its not that I lack it. I would say I have moderately low levels of both. They've both strengthened over the years. I trained myself to have cognitive empathy. My emotional/affective empathy has risen due to having more meaningful relationships. Back when I was a kid/teen, I didnt have friends so my empathy levels either way sunk to very low levels largely due to a lack of understanding. I remember my friend was very late to hangout with me cause someone bumped into her car when she was at a stop. She wasnt hurt tho. I remember still being mad at her cause she was late and having absolutely no empathy for the situation.



FishStickNick
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15 May 2012, 1:17 pm

I think I experience cognitive empathy more than emotional empathy. Like, I know that someone is going to be sad if a family member dies, and I can relate on some level to what they're going through, but I may not "feel" their pain. That doesn't mean I absolutely don't feel emotional empathy--some things will trigger an emotional response from me--but those instances tend to be less frequent.

The poll results are fascinating so far, by the way. Interesting how almost everyone feel they come down on one side or the other, and very few describe themselves as feeling both normally.



Ettina
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06 Jul 2012, 7:44 pm

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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).


No, because you can feel emotionally for someone based on a misinterpretation of what they're feeling. For example, I see my friend frowning in class and think she's mad at the teacher. I start analyzing what the teacher said around the time she started frowning, trying to think of what might have annoyed my friend. I'm feeling all ready to either commisserate or try to defend the teacher, depending on what it is. Then I ask her after class, and it turns out I mistook concentration for anger.