"lack of empathy"

[icesyckel]

Yeah, I really think the hardest thing about Asperger's is putting the array of symptoms that comprise the syndrome into words. I mean, I think we can all agree it is inaccurate to simply state we lack "empathy," without any qualification. The word "empathy" has so many meanings, and the Aspie impaired "empathy" is not the standard/popularly known definition for that term.

I sometimes find it very inefficient for one word to have multiple meanings.

 

[Keith]

I guess I'm the only one who thought of Blade Runner when I saw the title. LOL.

I think our brains just developed differently from NTs and it's difficult to picture how "normal" people view the world and react to everyday things. It's not just aspies. Imagine if you were an NT, but left-handed. Wouldn't it be hard to understand what life would be like if you were right-handed like 90% of the population?

Since we do not experience life in the same way as NTs, we cannot understand how they feel as well in certain situations.

 

[icesyckel]

I am largely ambidextrous, but I favor Mr. Lefty. I feel like I have lost the point somewhere.

 

[Keith]

I guess what I'm proposing is that we DON'T lack empathy...we just show it differently. Between us, we perceive it just fine. But they don't catch our expressions of empathy because they're no more capable of understanding our paradigm than we are of understanding theirs (in fact, because of spending a lifetime of trying to live in their world...we're actually BETTER at adapting to a different paradigm (i.e., empathy) because we've had more practice).

Someone who is bilingual where English is their second language may not speak English as well as I do, but I can't speak THEIR language at all! If I judge them only against native English speakers, they look like they have some kind of language dysfunction. But they're not dysfunctional at all. In fact, they understand language much better than I do because they've been able to incorporate two completely different languages into their communication skills set, which gives them insights that I can't even imagine if I've only ever spoken English.

Your second paragraph I like. Someone working at a low-end job like McDonald's or something may, in fact, have been a college professor in Mexico. However, because they can't speak English very well, they can't get a good job here and are viewed as "uneducated".

 

[bentHnau]

I think there is also an issue of NTs incorporating more of other people, more social knowledge, into their personalities. I would expect their tendency to mirror other people and their heightened awareness of how other people might see the situation to affect their emotional response. Kind of like an emotional aspect of some sort of collective unconscious.

Imagine little jr. NT going through life constantly seeing people react in similar ways in similar circumstances, and noticing that she is expected to react that way herself, and all of these experiences are rather reinforcing because jr. NT feels more or less the same. Just as other social nuances become automatic, associating x emotional response with y situation is assimilated into her personality such that when y occurs, she automatically feels x. Like when people get distraught over the lack of status symbols they don't even really care about; it's important to society, so it becomes important to them.

Then imagine little jr. neurovariant person, less socially aware, not paying so much attention to how people react, not often knowing that those responses are expected because the expectations are not made explicit, and perhaps not really absorbing any of what is understood due to having an atypical emotional profile that makes it difficult to relate, or a poor understanding for non-logical systems. This person never got logged into the collective emotional unconscious, and after a lifetime with that deficit, seems unempathetic, but half the time, what this person fails to empathize with is an assimilated, diffuse societal attitude rather than a strongly individual experience.

 

[DogwoodTree]

Just speaking for myself, I would not. I find it easier to mentally sort through what another aspie is thinking/feeling, but it doesn't just come to me intuitively like a reflex. I still have to use my head - just nowhere to the same extent. If you look at that second link I posted, we actually process this sort of information differently neurologically.

Yes, I came across that article a couple of weeks ago...very good article. My question, though, would be, which came first: the compensatory neurology or the cognitive emphasis on social interaction?

So...think about someone who is born blind. Their brains probably look very much like anyone else's brain at that age. But check the brain again in a few years, after living with no eyesight and compensating by super-developing the auditory and other portions of the brain, and it will probably look very different. They probably use different pathways, different areas of the brain. One might even look at their brains, see that the visual portion is not well developed at all, and conclude that the person can't see because their visual centers are so underdeveloped.

If an aspie child was raised by other aspies who KNEW they're aspies and didn't have a problem with this and were able to help the child develop their strengths rather than condemning them for their weaknesses...would that child's brain still show the same kind of compensatory neurology that most of ours have developed? Maybe...the emphasis on cognitively processing social interactions is because of the paradigm gap, rather than the result of these different ways of understanding life. And if we were raised by people who operated under the same social rules as we naturally would develop...so that we could develop more naturally to the way our brains are supposed to develop during life...then there might not be that kind of neurology that is discussed in the article at all.

Obviously, this would require some very specialized research to determine, but there's nothing wrong with asking the questions, right?

I have no data with which to analyze or test this hypothesis, but it does seem sound/reasonable that they would have some difficulty in the reverse situation.

Though it's not controlled research, this board alone is full of qualitative data that clearly show the nt's inability, in general, to intuitively understand our social paradigm. We have a few heroic NTs on this board who take the time to try to figure all of this out. But for the most part, NTs don't understand how we function, what's important to us, how we feel, or how we view the world. They expect us to conform to their standards, and our level of dysfunction is determined by how well or how poorly we take responsibility for bridging the paradigm gap.

So much more I want to say...but DH is waiting for me to go get some coffee with him.

Real quick...there are several articles like this one and I don't have time to find the one that I liked the most. Will look for it later...I'm not posting this to try to offend the open-minded NTs who put so much of their hearts into understanding their respective, beloved aspies! But I am amused by the way these "neurotypical syndrome" descriptions turn the table around!

Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical

 

[icesyckel]

but there's nothing wrong with asking the questions, right?

Of course not

So, you believe some of the issues described in the articles we discussed and their points on brain activity are, in essence, just noting the effects of neuroplasticity and living with NT's vs. other Aspies? That is an interesting thought.

 

[May Black]

This is an extremely interesting discussion.

However, @May, I do believe the lack of empathy is entirely about how we are "wired."

Semantics aside, this is not the sort of empathy or sympathy we lack. It's why I always hate the Sheldon character on BBT (since he propagates this myth). It is our cognitive empathy that is impaired - being able to intuitively know what someone else is subjectively feeling/thinking in the heat of the moment without having to be told or have it explained.

This kind of left me feeling like an abomination. I feel my empathy is analytic, but the process itself is extremely fast and doesn't take longer than a couple of seconds. I don't need to be told, but it's not intuitive. I am quite certain about that. I do things intuitively and it feels different. It works exactly the same way with my NT friends and with my Aspie boyfriend or my Aspie pupils, however, I noticed that the lower functioning part of the spectrum was a bit more problematic for me.

Referencing the example of someone who lost a cat and is sad...what if the person in the example grew up in a culture where they eat cats and view them the same way we view cows. Very few people would see a cow as something to be attached to, so we wouldn't immediately make the connection that someone might be sad that a cow died. We may have thought, "oh, now they have a freezer full of beef." Does that mean there's a lack of empathy? A lack of the ability to see the world from the grieving person's perspective? No, there's just a different paradigm at work, and the need for increased communication.

I don't quite agree with this example. Someone NT might be able to empathize with the feelings of loss without having to understand the real meaning of it, simply because emotional signals are fairly universal. What makes it difficult is not the cause of the emotion, but the actual expression of it. I might be completely wrong about this, but it seems to me Aspies do not necessarily process their own emotions the same way as NT either, and it might take them much longer time to for example realize that they're sad because their cat died, than it would for an NT person.

Though it's not controlled research, this board alone is full of qualitative data that clearly show the nt's inability, in general, to intuitively understand our social paradigm. We have a few heroic NTs on this board who take the time to try to figure all of this out. But for the most part, NTs don't understand how we function, what's important to us, how we feel, or how we view the world. They expect us to conform to their standards, and our level of dysfunction is determined by how well or how poorly we take responsibility for bridging the paradigm gap.

I actually think the NT world to large extent does not understand, because they aren't required to do so. If you look at the example of the NT on this board, I believe what makes us different is our interest and knowledge. I'd like to assume that an average Aspie might put a life long effort into trying to understand the NT world and has a deep knowledge of it. As such, the NT on this board should be taken as equally comparable, since our involvement in each other's worlds is on somewhat same level.

 

[AsheSkyler]

I back the translation thing. A dog licks you in the face, a cat drops a mouse head in your lap. Neither cares for you less, they just have different ways of showing it.

 

[radasp]

I deal with the outrageous claims about empathy on my blog: Asperger: The HypoSocial Human | Investigating the Asperger brain as a legacy of ancestral humans. It's an invention of certain psychologists; if you analyze what they are saying they are actually describing telepathy or mind reading. Empathy is Sci-Fi, not science.

 

[DogwoodTree]

So, you believe some of the issues described in the articles we discussed and their points on brain activity are, in essence, just noting the effects of neuroplasticity and living with NT's vs. other Aspies? That is an interesting thought.

To a degree, yes. It's a possibility for consideration, anyway.

One way to test would be to compare brains of aspies raised by NT's to brains of aspies raised by self-accepting aspies.

 

[bentHnau]

I deal with the outrageous claims about empathy on my blog

I couldn't find the post.

 

[DogwoodTree]

This: "autistic empathy"

ASPIE STRATEGY: The Hidden Autistics II: Asperger's in Adults and Empathy

 

[Kari Suttle]

Does this phrase bother anyone else? I feel like it's saying that I don't care. I DO care...I just have a hard time seeing things and understanding the world the way more "normal" people do.

But then...they have a hard time--and often not much desire even--seeing and understanding things the way I do. So maybe they have even greater "lack of empathy"? J/k

Seriously, though, I think the people on this board don't have any trouble at all understanding each other most of the time...we speak the same "language". If a non-English speaking person had a terrible understanding of what I'm saying in English, I don't accuse him of not caring or even of being unable to understand. I simply realize we speak different languages. Seems like the same standard should apply to the way peoples' brains are wired to perceive and process the world?

There has to be a better way of describing this trait without making it sound like we simply can't connect with NTs. It's a "lost in translation" phenomenon that goes BOTH ways, not a sensitivity failure on our part alone.

Don't forget that the whole list of symptoms for diagnosing AS/HFA was written up by NTs. People on the spectrum/who have AS experience life and express emotions differently. I think that sometimes i feel more deeply than others around me i just can't ever show it like i'd like. It comes off as something totally different to others, it seems. Even my immediate family will think i'm mad when actually i'm upset, or vice versa. Same goes for empathy - even if most of the time i'm just projecting what i would feel in their situation onto them, i'm empathizing with it way too well for anyone to call that 'a lack of empathy'. Perhaps an inability to see things from another's point of view, but not a lack of empathy. Or emotions.