Empathy Quotient

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I thought I had empathy too... But I agree this is measuring something else than just "feeling sorry" for someone.

Oh man, I only got 16.
Way to go, Baron-Cohen, making me feel like a psycho.
I care about people, you know. I look after my kids and pets, and cry buckets at the movies. What do you call that, if not empathy?

The subject is empathy. Not sympathy. Two different things.

Even if I recognise how others feel it doesn't affects me emotionally all all except I see sadness or fun in someones face. I have nearly no emotional empathy only cognitive empathy. I hope I find a way to change this.

I scored 11 of 80 today. I think that it might be about 10 points higher.

51. I like to be very organized in day-to-day life and often makes lists of the chores I have to do. What answer would be more typical for people with ASD? Agree or disagree? Is it associated with repetitive behaviors and rigid thinking?

There are things that really get me going, like today someone posted a video of a dog being tortured on Facebook, I immediately.blocked the person, I don't know what kind of person would share that on Facebook.

A think a typical person with ASD craves organisation, but often has difficulty actually being organised. It goes to Executive Functioning.

Here's a good article about Executive Functioning:
https://www.understood.org/en/learning- ... e-function

Keep in mind that ASD is an fact several spectrums in one, so it's possible to be good at organisation and still have ASD. Which autistic traits a person has and how they affect the person will vary from person to person.

I have actually read before that this question is merely a control/filler question on the EQ test.

"[i]“Definitely agree” responses scored 2 points and “slightly agree” responses scored 1 point on the following items: 1, 6, 19, 22, 25, 26, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60. “Definitely disagree” responses scored 2 points and “slightly disagree” responses scored 1 point on the following items: 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 18, 21, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 39, 46, 48, 49, 50. For filler items, the total number of each possible response was computed to check for systematic bias in responding by each group. We predicted that the HFA/AS group should not differ on how they responded on these control items, compared with individuals in the general population."[/i] (http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/pa ... dSW_EQ.pdf)

Interesting.

I guess I can see that, because I think people with ASD tend to either be hyper-organised or hyper-disorganised. So, you'd probably have an even distribution between yes and no on the question, but usually on the extreme ends, not the "Slightly agree" or "slightly disagree" answers.

Oh my goodness! I scored 15. That's lower than I expected. Not that I was expecting a high score, but wow.

That's right. For me it's I just recognised my lack of empathy and it bothered me. But I'm even curious about the whole theme. For this I visited an autism meeting first time last week. I recognised quite huge mental differences but I think I could help quite many of this people.

Some of the people simply have an anxiety disorder that made them afraid of people. They simply show a strange movement because of their fear that people may judge them because of their strange behaviour. Once they get over their fear they would be quite nice normal people. But the initial cause of the fear must be long ago because the strange movements are mostly a kind of unsure self protection movement of very small childs.

Quite like of a guy that I once met in a bar. I told him that he need to show much more self-confidence to attract girls. He did strange movements with his arms while I talked to him. I didn't like it hit on his arm and told him he should stop that because it looks strange there is no reason to do so. Some weeks later I met him with a girl friend and without any strange behaviour of his arms. He just for fun showed me how he did it once with his arms and laughted because of himself doing it before. There is a way out.

I think many of Asperger's could get rid of the problems once they recognise the reason of the problems and get over it. Even me. I think own my problems could be a result of a hard rejection in the childhood by somebody I really liked and for this I learned to stop to develop any emotions of beeing attracted to other people for no more feeling rejected and getting hurt by my emotions anymore in my life. I think it's time to get over it and to learn to develop emotions again even for the risk of bad feelings. But it's a long way to go for me.

Oh good lord I got a 10. Thats...really really low. But like I mean I..I care about people! I mean, I dont...not care about people!

Yes Grace, I was taken aback too. But there are 2 different sorts of empathy. Someone earlier in this thread describes it well. At my assessment this was the thing I found hardest to understand, but it goes a long way to explain my communication difficulties. It appears to be quite a defining trait!

As I said above, there's two kinds of empathy - Affective (or deep) empathy, and Cognative (or shallow) empathy.

Affective empathy (which I don't think this test covers much) is about recognising people's emotional state and being affected by it (being around sad people makes you sad).

Cognitive empathy (which is what I think this test is all about) is about seeing things from other people's perspective and knowing how an action you take will affect them.

Both people with ASD and psychopaths lack empathy, but I think this is the big difference. People with ASD lack cognitive empathy, but may be very strong in Affective empathy. Psychopaths lack affective empathy, but may be very strong in cognitive empathy.

You care about people because you have good Affective empathy.

Yes, affective vs. cognitive empathy. I certainly don't react like a robot if/when I see someone in distress, as seems like the case with most here (we understand a person is sad, and we react to comfort them in some way). If I find out, cognitively, though, that their distress is caused by something that doesn't make sense to me (I'm unable to take on their perspective or see why that thing made them sad), then I cannot experience that thing from their frame of reference, and empathy is lost.

I think there are even more sorts of empathie. The 2 base forms of recognition are
cognitive empathie => you can recognise how others feel
emotional empathie => you can even feel like others feel
Both forms exist visual, verbal and for body contact and this all that for many different
feelings and emotions.
There is a difference between feelings (if you really feel something) and emotions
(that you generate at your own because of some circumstances i.e. if sombody that you
like or dislike is near to you). For feelings and emotions exist both forms of empathy.
If you don't feel an emotion than you also don't have any empathy for this emotion or
at maximum cognitive empathie. Then you know that sombody likes or dislikes something
but you can't even say for sure why he does.
I think my problem is my lack of several emotions and the related lack of empathie for them.