How easily do you get "embarassed for" other people? If I'm around someone who is, for whatever reason, really embarrassing themselves, that's a physically uncomfortable thing for me to watch. The last such experience I remember was about a year and a half ago when I was in one of my graduate-level literature courses. One of my classmates was giving a presentation, and for reasons I didn't really understand (I suspect he had some kind of mental health issues, but I don't really know), he became visibly uncomfortable presenting the material he had been assigned to present (partially due to the sexual content of the play that he was doing a presentation on, I think), began to act really strangely, and even behaved a little bit disrespectfully toward the professor teaching the class (a less tolerant and easygoing professor probably would have asked him to leave). I had been fairly friendly with this classmate up to this point (even if he came across as rather odd sometimes), but it was at that point where I decided I didn't really want anything else to do with him. For me, watching him have this weird mini-meltdown was an intensely uncomfortable experience, and I became even more uncomfortable when I overheard other people in the class having a "What the hell was that?!?!?" conversation outside during our break period in which one person speculated that the classmate giving the presentation was some kind of sexual deviant and that the content of the play he was presenting on hit a little too "close to home" (I was slightly afraid that people would associate me with his behavior somehow). This was an evening class, and when I went home that night and went to bed, I had found the experience in class so upsetting that I didn't sleep well that night (I consoled myself a little by reminding myself that my last semester of grad school was nearly over and that I was not likely to experience anything like that again anytime soon).
I don't know if intense feelings of embarrassment for others is AS-related or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. It seems like it's one of many examples of how, far from not having any empathy, aspies sometimes experience so much empathy that it's a little overwhelming. I'm currently reading the book Be Different by John Elder Robison (pretty good so far), and there's a passage where he says that he thinks that being on the autism spectrum makes his sense of self a little weaker than most of the people in the NT population and that concepts of "me" and "you" can feel a little blurry to him sometimes.
I don't know if intense feelings of embarrassment for others is AS-related or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. It seems like it's one of many examples of how, far from not having any empathy, aspies sometimes experience so much empathy that it's a little overwhelming. I'm currently reading the book Be Different by John Elder Robison (pretty good so far), and there's a passage where he says that he thinks that being on the autism spectrum makes his sense of self a little weaker than most of the people in the NT population and that concepts of "me" and "you" can feel a little blurry to him sometimes.
