Autistics people very often have heightened affective empathy & sometimes there is a disconnect between feeling what others are feeling and knowing why they are feeling that way. I challenge the notion that autistic people have reduced cognitive empathy - because cognitive empathy can exist independently of facial analysis, social cues, and a display of empathy.
Autistics people very often have heightened affective empathy & sometimes there is a disconnect between feeling what others are feeling and knowing why they are feeling that way.
I challenge the notion that autistic people have reduced cognitive empathy - because cognitive empathy can exist independently of facial analysis, social cues, and a display of empathy.
Hello and welcome to my podcast! Today I'm going to be talking about empathy, and I'd like to dispel some stereotypes about autistic people surrounding empathy.
To get started, there are two types of empathy. Contrary to what many people like to think of as empathy, you have cognitive empathy and you have affective empathy:
Cognitive empathy is the ability to imagine another person's perspective, to put yourself in their shoes, so to speak. (I'm going to be giving some examples of cognitive empathy shortly.)
Meanwhile, there's another type of empathy called affective empathy. Affective empathy is basically the feeling of other people's emotional states and the ability to relate to another person on an emotional level. When someone around you is feeling a certain way and you feel that same way, that's an example of effective—or affective—empathy.
So there's a lot of stereotypes regarding autism and empathy. It's pretty frustrating to have all these negative stereotypes when the majority of them are actually inaccurate. Where did this come from—the stereotype that autistic people don't have empathy?
Well, according to the research that I've done, a lot of people with autism may seemingly struggle with cognitive empathy because they're unable to recognize and name emotions based on facial expressions. But here's the thing: is it possible to know what emotion another person is feeling without facial cues, without facial expressions? In fact, the part of the brain that controls understanding and interpretation of facial expressions—the fusiform gyrus—I would even argue is not a requirement for emotional processing. It's more of a cause-and-effect situation: when someone's happy, they smile as a result; when someone's sad, they frown as a result.
But I think that there's a huge difference between the ability to read facial cues and expressions and link them to emotional states, compared to the ability to imagine things from a different perspective and relate to people at a cognitive level.
So there's a lot of biased researchers out there who will tell you that autistic people lack cognitive empathy because they can't read these facial cues. But if that were the case, then does that mean they lack empathy with themselves because they can't read their own facial cues? Of course not! That doesn't even make sense. How could you lack empathy for yourself? It doesn't make sense. So I challenge and argue that cognitive empathy is independent of facial cues and can be understood and experienced in a different way, regardless of being able to read faces.
Alexithymia, one of the conditions I've talked about in one of my previous podcasts, can make a huge difference. Alexithymia is the inability to recognize one's internal emotional states in a given moment. If you can't read your own emotional states in a given moment, can you even imagine how challenging it might be to recognize another person's emotional states in that moment? It's really tricky, and I don't think that it's really fair to autistic people to say that autistic people don't have empathy, or even to say that autistic people have reduced cognitive empathy.
In fact, from all of my observations and anecdotal stuff, I've actually observed that autistic people have increasedempathy, definitely from the effective/affective empathy standpoint. Because we're hyper-attuned to our sensory environment, which means that anytime something subtle changes—an angry person walks in the room, a sad person walks in the room, a happy person walks in the room—we feel all these changes energetically, and we notice them, and we can determine when something's out of place.
So sometimes there is a disconnect between this affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Suppose you do have an autistic person who has higher empathy for affective empathy, but lower empathy for cognitive empathy: this might result in someone walking into the room feeling very, very angry. The autistic person knows that they're feeling angry, but has no way of knowing what it's linked to. They don't know if the other person is angry at them, is angry at themselves, is angry at the world. We get this heightened perception of emotions that can be so overwhelming to deal with, but it can be really difficult for us to figure out what it's linked to, how it connects.
But I think it's still not accurate to say that autistic people have less cognitive empathy, because the autistic people that I've met actually do have a desire to see life from their perspective. We do! We actively go out and try to listen to people, try to understand their perspectives. In fact, autistic people put in so much effort trying to empathize with other people. I would say we put in more effort than neurotypical people, because we have to—because it's the only way to have any form of communication and not be constantly misunderstood.
I mean, if autistic facial expressions are already mismatching for neurotypicals, and neurotypical people look at our faces and think that we are experiencing one emotion when really it's a different emotion, then of course we're going to basically grow up with a lifetime of misunderstanding. And so most autistic people that I've met take this misunderstanding and actively try harder than anyone else to rectify it.
And so what I've observed is that it's not that autistic people don't have empathy. I simply think that it's a different process. It's a totally different process. When we experience other people's emotions, it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming! Take a neurotypical person and how they might experience their emotions, and then add someone else into the mix: autistic people get overwhelmed by our own emotions to begin with. Like even the tiniest little thing can be really hard to process sometimes. So if you can't adequately process your own emotions, how can you possibly process other people's? Add even more than one person to the mix, and this is a recipe for disaster, because the affective empathy is so high that it becomes necessary to shut down or take a step back from it, because it's simply too much to handle, too much to process in a certain moment.
I think it's important to note that being unable or missing certain social cues is not the same as not having cognitive empathy. On the one hand, cognitive empathy—let's—let's Google this, shall we? Cognitive empathy refers to how well an individual can perceive and understand the emotions of another person. Cognitive empathy, also known as empathic accuracy, involves having more complete and accurate knowledge about the contents of another person's mind, including how the person feels. People who practice it typically imagine themselves in the other person's position and speculate on emotions they might feel or actions they might take given the same circumstances.
Pretty much every autistic person I've met—and maybe I'm just meeting only the high-functioning ones—spends an enormous amount of time trying to understand other people, why they do things, considering all the perspectives, thinking about all the possibilities, trying to understand them. So many autistic people develop an interest in body language and psychology as a result. Some of them go on to get PhDs in these fields and become excellent therapists, because we love to analyze situations! If you take someone who has an increased capacity for pattern recognition and throw in a desire to understand other people's perspectives, I would actually argue that is higher cognitive empathy than the average neurotypical person.
But the thing is that researchers can only describe and see things from their perspective. Sounds kind of like a lack of cognitive empathy to you? It sure does to me!
And so then the question becomes: why does the stereotype exist? Why are people with autism seen as having less cognitive empathy?
Well, according to this site, those with autism commonly have difficulty interpreting non-verbal communication, such as body language and facial expressions. And people with autism do not tend to engage in spontaneous imitation of others as children, because children learn social skills through mimicry. Those with autism may have difficulty displaying typicalexpressions of empathy.
Notice what they said there: typical expressions.
What if we express empathy in a different way? A way that is frequently misunderstood or misperceived by neurotypical people? What if people with autism—although they have difficulty interpreting non-verbal communication—if this is a skill that can be learned, then can you truly say that someone who's autistic has reduced cognitive empathy?
See, there's a separation here: you have the ability and the skill to read facial expressions and read social situations, and then independently of that and separately of that, you have cognitive empathy—the ability to imagine the emotions and actions that another person would take in a specific circumstance. I challenge the notion that autistic people have reduced cognitive empathy. I absolutely challenge that! And I think that all of these stereotypes are a result of biased researchers not knowing what cognitive empathy looks like for autistic people, because they're neurotypical and can't imagine otherwise.
There's like such a level of irony here, seriously. The ones who are telling us that we don't have cognitive empathy are unable to perceive things from our point of view, which is associated with cognitive empathy! It honestly cracks me up. There's like so many contradictions here.
And so like all of these articles, they're like saying, "Okay, autistic people have reduced cognitive empathy, blah blah blah, how to fix it, can it be taught?" And then they start using all of these role-playing situations to try to help children mimic better, to help them display empathy. But here's the thing: does a truly empathetic person need to display empathy for them to be empathetic?
I argue no. You can be very empathetic without displaying it. You can feel another person's emotions and understand their intentions and perceive all of their different actions they could take without needing to display a thing. So then all of these questionable research articles talking about empathy and autistic people are not actually measuring empathy itself, but rather the display of it.
This is a huge problem! You have a group of researchers thinking a problem exists when really there is none, or at best they're focusing on all the wrong things. These researchers aren't actually focused on helping autistic people improve their lives; they're not. They're simply focused on improving the perception of normality—the perception, the mask. They're basically trying to teach us how to mask and claim that we don't have empathy if we don't. And that's a problem. That's a huge, huge problem.
And so when you're an autistic person like me who has extremely high affective empathy, you have to be really careful who you hang out with. If you have really high affective empathy and you're surrounded with a bunch of happy people, it's amazing! The energy just bounces back and forth, and you're feeling great, and life is good. But if you're a person with high affective empathy and people around you are angry or sad, it is really hard to be able to disconnect from that.
So if you couple that with being unable to adequately read facial expressions and know what they mean, with increased empathy, it becomes a confused mess. Because the autistic person is like, "Okay, I know this person is angry. How can I help them? How can I help them be happier? What actions can I take so that they'll feel less angry and feel happier?"
Many autistic people want to help other people, but we just don't really always know how to. Because autistic people pretty much only complain about something when we're looking for a problem to be solved. This varies vastly with neurotypical people, who complain in an effort to bond socially. Autistic people don't do that; we don't! If we complain about something, it's a problem, and we want the problem fixed, and we will welcome any solutions to the problem. We're not going to resent people for bringing up solutions because of some status difference.
And so there's so much—so much research that's simply inaccurate. It's really frustrating, especially as someone who is a high-functioning autistic person. If you have really high affective empathy and you have a desire to connect with people at a deeper level, and you're willing to do whatever it takes to understand another person's perspective, it's frustrating when researchers dismiss all of that based on poor sample size, poorly controlled trials, and research only for white male children. It's really frustrating.
And so I hope that this has illuminated some of the issues that currently pervade these autistic stereotypes.
Yes, it is true that as someone who's always had all of my core needs met, I can't—I can't imagine what it would be like to be hungry or homeless or not know where my next meal is coming from. I've never had that experience, and it's difficult to imagine. But I can still do it! It's not that autistic people can't imagine things, like all these researchers might claim; it just sometimes maybe requires a little bit more effort, or requires a different process of connection—a different process between understanding another person's perspective and connecting it to the emotional charge behind it.
And I think a lot of this is also tied to facial expressions. When I look at someone's facial expression now, algorithmically I can determine, "Okay, they're sad, they're happy, they're angry, they're contemptuous, they're whatever," but I don't actually feel the core emotion mirrored back to me from it. My understanding is that neurotypical people, when they look at other people's faces like that, they feel some kind of emotion based on that person's face that's like reflected back to them. Autistic people, we don't really get that. But I don't actually think that that's tied to empathy in any way. I think that empathy, both cognitive and affective, can exist independently of facial expressions and of being able to read social cues. I think that these are independent ideas that should be carefully studied under better controlled research and more accurate data.
And that's the crux of the issue here: we have researchers who are not autistic making these ridiculous trials, making all these ridiculous conclusions, because they have simply no idea what it's like. And I don't really know how to change it; it's really tricky, because research goes where money goes, and there's a whole lot of bias in research, especially when it comes to autism. People act like it's a death sentence, when it can actually be a gift. It just really doesn't make any sense why there's so much stigma behind it.
Maybe if we accepted that people have value independently of what they can produce and what they can do, maybe if we've accepted that as a priority, then the stigma behind disabilities would lessen quite a bit. That's my goal: to be the catalyst to help people understand and to help get rid of all these harmful stereotypes.
Thank you so much for listening!