Things a lack of empathy (affective emotion specifically) is not.
- A lack of feelings or emotions
- An inability to understand that other people have minds and feelings
- Not caring about other people’s feelings
- Not caring about other people
- Inability to love
- Difficulty reading facial expressions
- A fundamental part of being human
- An inability to be nice to people
- Something all autistic people have
- Something all autistic people do not have
It appears that autistic people have much more variable levels of affective empathy (cognitive empathy is different and to do with reading facial expressions or body language and is both totally distinct from affective emotion and not what is commonly thought of as empathy), so many of us have very high levels of empathy, and many of us have very low levels of empathy. Some of us also have average levels of empathy. Lacking empathy is not the same as lacking emotions.
Oh my god, I’m so glad they posted this because I was worried I’d have to actually ask someone and I didn’t want to offend people but I knew my vague idea of what ‘empathy’ means must be wrong because autistic folks without empathy aren’t socio/psychopaths, obvs, but that was my only idea of what a lack of empathy *is* because I always considered compassion a part of empathy so this is so fucking helpful and useful and yeah.
thank you, autisticfandomthings!
p.s. feel free to delete my caption if you reblog! i know i would :P