“I feel with you.”
NT Experience
Empathy is not an emotion per se, rather it is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. There are a wide range of definitions but for the purpose of my notes:
- Affective Empathy (mirroring) – feeling the emotions that another person is experiencing. This is also called emotional contagion, which describes picking up the mood of another person or the room.
- Cognitive Empathy (perspective taking) – understanding another person’s perspective or mental state. NT people would understand this to be implicit.
Empathy helps people understand each other, builds trust, strengthens relationships and drives prosocial behavior. People often think about it in terms of helping each other with emotional issues.
My Experience
I have no functional empathy, though I can experience Sympathy if I understand what emotions or distress the person is feeling.
No Affective Empathy
I have no Social Salience so I have no emotional signal and affective empathy is impossible for me. A person in distress who is quiet is the same as a quiet person to me.
Cognitive Empathy of a Sort
If I have an explicit signal, “I am sad because X”, I can mentally model their state and may be able to understand. Some things that people might be upset about would not be upsetting to me (see no Shame). I might be able to feel Sympathy in that case – I can understand that they are upset without knowing why.
NT people would not consider this cognitive empathy as it is manually constructed and requires explicit signal – many times when people are upset they can’t explain themselves.
Narrative Affective Resonance
Note: I am not sure this is a legit term, though you can find some hits for it on google. I am going with the LLM definition of it as it made sense to me, describing my experience.
When I hear a moving story I can construct my own equivalent mental model and experience my own emotions as if I were in that state. If my feelings match theirs or are close enough, I may appear to have empathy, but again, these are my own feelings.
For example, in the movie Up, the initial sequence (no dialogue) tells a compelling story where the couple is happily married but when they try to have children they are unable to do so and eventually the wife dies. I can imagine myself in that situation and feel the permanent loss of his spouse and the dreams they had together all becoming worthless. Waterworks.
Another example is if somebody’s cat or dog dies I will feel very sad. I have had my own cats and currently have a dog. I can picture when my own dog is near death and dying. I may be at the vet office holding him as he breathes his last. Even typing this I am tearing up. This will be a significant permanent loss of a beloved pet/family member. I will be very sad and I may express this sadness to the other person. It is not empathy, but it is as close as I can get.
A third example is books: they provide a pure literal signal. Authors often write what people feel or the social signals they are picking up. I can feel the same sense of loss for characters and events in books as I do for real life. Some authors, notably Brandon Sanderson can give me a thrill when competent characters reveal their abilities or accomplish something notable.
Notably I can only use this where I can model and experience the situation or something close to it. This is easiest for sadness – permanent loss of something unique is my primary trigger.
This is not a social function, this is a logical simulation of values. I am not “feeling what they feel”. Technically this is autonoetic thought where I reenact the concept of loss within my own value system. It is a functional bridge but not empathy.
Comparison
I have no affective empathy at all and my “cognitive empathy” is not really that.
Semantic Divergence: yes, sort of – I am not sure I ever claimed to have empathy. I certainly didn’t know what it was.