two kinds of empathy?

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How can it be I (and most autistics) score dramatically low at empathy

AND

I (and a lot of autistics as far as I know) am a lot concerned, above average, about values in our society, I am angry when human rights are violated, when humans are oppressed, etc. I have also often engaged time and money to fight for "a better world". Is this not true it empathy?

There is something I don't understand. Are there two kinds of empathy? Maybe there is the instinctive emotional empathy (tested in tests) and the cerebral, logical, active empathy?

I've heard that there's deep and shallow empathy. Deep empathy we can have in spades, shallow empathy is what we struggle with, whereas psychopathy would be the opposite.

I know for myself my empathy is very all or nothing. I do find picking up on real time cues very difficult/impossible depending on context, but I care deeply. Sometimes it's such intense empathy that it's almost like I am going through what the other person is. Someone disclosed some sexual abuse they experienced last year and I couldn't sleep, was vomiting and experienced very confusing responses. I've never experienced any abuse so it wasn't a response you'd expect from someone with normal empathy.

I have stopped listening to radio news in the morning for some years because it was making me cry... but i'm tested more or less zero empathy too.

I googled the shallow /deep empathy. I never heard about it before.

Then the empathy tests must be somewhat shallowly and hence may lead to big mistakes

Empathy and sympathy are two different things.

Crying about others suffering is sympathy.

Being able to figure out the motives of folks around you is empathy.

Sociopaths have empathy but no sympathy. Autistics lack empathy, but can have sympathy, and may have the latter in greater amount than the next person.

Hi.
I'm a sympathetic robot.
Please leave your distress after the tone, be factual and direct.
I will respond quicker than I can at the best of my mechanics.
Beep.

Haha! I have tried to explain to people a thousand times in my life: I want to hear the content of what you're saying, I'm struggling with the packaging.

There are a lot of threads on wp about this. There are two kinds of empathy--cognitive, like learned appropriate ways to treat others, and emotional, like feeling another's physical and emotional pain. A lot of autistics are high on the emotional empathy because we are hyper aware, but low on the cognitive because we never picked up on the social expectations.

It's no good generalizing which group of people lack X and have Y. Autistics are all different, and so are NTs.

I know an NT at work who's the most bigheaded, confident, outspoken person I've ever met. His girlfriend looks like a supermodel. But this bloke lacks empathy big time, even though he's loud and popular. You cannot have a conversation about emotional things with him, and if you do speak seriously to him, he'll just laugh. He thinks animal torture is funny, and he is very self-centered and doesn't seem connected to people emotionally. All he can do when communicating is swear and joke and just talk dirty. I don't think he feels any empathy at all, and I bet he was a bully when he was young.

Me, however, I'm a very empathetic person. Instead of throwing cliches at people like "stop moaning" or "you're so negative" or "just don't worry", I actually like to listen and imagine myself in their shoes and make them feel that they are not alone. I'm not very good with some advice (for example financial advice), but I'm good with emotional advice. Sometimes I sound like a therapist if I go into a detailed theory about how they are probably feeling and I've often been told that I am "emotionally bright".
Also I have good ToM too. Once I bought 2 teddy bears because I couldn't resist, but I knew my mum wouldn't like it if I intentionally bought more "clutter" into the house, so I decided to pretend I won the teddies in a raffle so that it makes the purchase look more unintentional. I was with a friend at the time, and told her to play along. But when I was with my friend and my mum in the same room, my friend accidentally said, "did you show your boyfriend those teddies that you bought?" When she realised she had said 'bought' she casually added, "I meant won or whatever", I still knew that that would not give away the white lie because my mum knows that most, if not, all the things I have brought home were bought intentionally, and very rarely been won. So even if I really had won the teddies, it's still easy to accidentally say 'bought'. And I could tell my mum hadn't figured anything out.
Also I can easily 'read' people's intentions. Like at work I could tell this guy likes a girl there, because of his body language towards her. But my social intuition also tells me not to say anything because the guy might not want it to be out in the open, or maybe he could be married. I don't know if the others have noticed but are doing the same thing as me and keeping quiet about it.

But yes I do have Asperger's because I was too socially isolated as a teenager to be NT or just ADHD on it's own. I was stereotypically socially isolated, more so than some Aspies here.

Yes there are at least 2 kinds of empathy, there are difficulties in defining it and there's more than one definiton out there, so to simply say a person lacks empathy is pretty vague, though people do that. I think it would be better to drop the term. It's overloaded with multiple meanings and to be labelled as not having it probably carries quite a social stigma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Definitions

"The paradigm case of an empathic interaction........involves a person communicating an accurate recognition of the significance of another person's ongoing intentional actions, associated emotional states, and personal characteristics in a manner that the recognized person can tolerate. Recognitions that are both accurate and tolerable are central features of empathy"

According to that, it's not just a matter of knowing how somebody feels, you also have to feed it back to them in a way they can handle. I suspect it's a rare event even among the general population.

Sometimes the packaging is so big and full of other packaging that they do not know themselves what is in there, i'm afraid.
In that case you should respond to the packaging with another empty packaging, because it is what they are looking for, which I am not good at, I confess.