Simon Baron-Cohen: Aspergers Less Empathetic than Psycopaths

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in that very limited respect I am like spock.

You know, I wasn't talking to you. I replied to "Nick" who was being sarcastic - and I replied in the same tone. It really wasn't something directed at you, so why all the fuss?

what fuss?

Pretty sure it did, but I'll explain: the comment you were responding to in the post which I quoted previously was saying something along the lines of "all NTs suck". There are numerous posters who would have made a similar reply to the one you made, however, their intent would have been to agree that there are no good NTs rather than to sarcastically point out that the first comment was unreasonable.

I'm not sure I can make it any more clear than that.

That seems about right.

I doubt anyone with a genuine ASD has that above (a good portion of the symptoms require you to lack this).

Actually it makes perfect sense, in the context--specifically the claim that the comment was sarcasm.

It may well be sarcasm, but it is indistinguishable from a comment in support of the statement (in agreement with the comment you were responding to).
Further, there are many here who might make such a statement (there's a lot of people here who would have posted what you did)

The sense is clear.

I wrote to Simon Baron-Cohen about this after reading the Guardian piece and he replied with the very clear statement that people with autism and asperger syndrome have trouble with 'cognitive empathy' ('theory of mind') but have 'affective empathy' (aka compassion).

I think he would say that Acedia's seeming trouble with affective empathy is a result of poor cognitive empathy. I also experience this. You can't feel compassion with an emotional state that you don't know is being felt--e.g., my colleague told a sort of white lie claiming not to be upset about something and I was the only one who believe her because I did not see that she would naturally be very upset and was covering this with the lie. Everyone else was pretending to believe it, but no one did. Except me.

Anyway, the quotes at the beginning of the thread do not accurately reflect Baron-Cohen's thinking.

I misunderstood the concepts, I thought affective empathy was simply reading people, or is it?

I can feel compassion when I know that a person is upset. I often get other people's emotional states and thoughts wrong. Like I have thought people are upset when they're not.

I don't think affective empathy is reading people at all.

There is a brief description of a study into autism and empathy by Baron-Cohen's Autism Research Center that summarizes it this way (my bolding added to emphasize relevant points):

http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/project_1_empathy

Incidentally, this last sentence about what the ARC work "is showing" is contradicted by Professor Baron-Cohen's reply to me:


So if you feel sad when you know that someone else is sad, that's affective empathy. But if you have deficits in cognitive empathy, you may not know, simply from observation, what the inner state of another person might be. In such a situation, you cannot exercise your affective empathy, because you simply don't know what the emotional state of other is, and therefore cannot respond to it.

[EDITED TO ADD:]In this way, while one might have full affective empathy, it's operation might be impaired by a disrupted cognitive empathy with the result that one would appear to have a deficit in affective empathy.

It seem to me that the "reading the emotions of others" idea depends largely on cognitive empathy. But also on some more basic responses that may be thought of as components of affective empathy, "emotional contagion," for example. When I wrote to Baron-Cohen, I mentioned a recent study that showed that individuals with autism showed initial responses to images of other people in pain very much in the same way neurotypicals do, but then went through a process of second guessing the meaning of those signals. This seems to suggest that the perception of emotive circumstances is there, but something goes awry in the processing of those perceptions that impairs the formation of a theory about the mental state of the observed person--the cognitive empathy /ToM aspect.

I think these results seem work well with the ideas about a processing disorder developed by Dr. Valerie Gaus on the basis of clinical observation and described in her book, "Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Adult Asperger Syndrome."

how does she fix it?

She doesn't fix it.

She identifies it clearly and demarcates areas where it will cause difficulty and then has you and your therapist work through ways to work around the place where the processing breaks down.

You can't fix it, but you can live more effectively and satisfyingly by being skillful with it.

I think that's a fair paraphrase of the idea.

ok in your opinion, how often does this "work around" end up being a hermit away from people?

I will post a bit more about this later, but for the moment will say that her method is CBT and she proposes interventions aimed at changing behavior in order to achieve goals. The exact goals are formulated with each patient but she uses a three axis model to organize thinking around this:

Satisfied <----------------------------------------> Unsatisfied
Likable <------------------------------------------> Unlikable
Normal looking <-------------------------------> Weird looking

Does that answer your question?

yes, thank you

Meh I donno about his qualities as a scientist but he's a good author.

He produces simple explanations of a complex issue, and provides a great deal of much needed speculation.


It irritates me when people igore the creative side of science. Science isn't the master of natural law it's a tool created by humans to understand natural law. Lake of creative solutions to complex problems in autism science is a major problem IMO.

His phrasing of Autistics as basically counterparts of phycopaths is a rather interesting outlook. I think in understanding physcopaths we can learn alot about ourselves. Physcopaths have degree of comfort with their detachment from humanity that many of us could benefit from.


Ironically my biggest pet peeve with SBC is his over emphasis on the importance of empathy in all its forms. I think many of the problems we have in our society are based on the assumption that everyone has an equal degree of empathy.

I think it is quintessential nonsense.
Even Carl Jung who is long gone did much better job IMO. Check out his explanations of extroverted Sensing and extroverted intuition eventough it is pseudo science. The first objectifies everything to be used and latter observers objects of interests in distance without need to manipulate them for your own goals. Aspies view of the world seems to be latter. These two points of view are opposite.

Need to persuade and command are not typical aspie traits.

Need to accumulate knowledge and find explanations are not typical male traits.