Empathy

Empathy is defined as the ability to understand (cognitive empathy) and share (effective empathy) the feelings of other people.

This may be somewhat complicated by alexithymia, the ability to feel and describe your own emotions.

It may also be confounded by the different ways Autistic and allistic people tend to relate to emotions in terms of communication style. For example, if someone describes a plight of theirs, we might offer a similar story of our own to show how much we can relate to it. Allistic people will likely misinterpret this as an attempt to one-up them with a disregard for their feelings, rather than a sign of camaraderie.

See also

• Double empathy problem