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Remember, it is not empathy unless you respond appropriately to the other person.
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This sentence is obnoxious. Who is to say what is and is not an appropriate response? (The NTs, of course.)
Okay, so the author of the article is using that phrase and the assumption that Aspies never respond appropriately to the other person to justify her statement that Aspies have zero degrees of empathy.
Looking at
Dictionary.com's explanation of the difference between empathy and sympathy, it does sound a little bit like some of you arguing against the article are confusing the two.
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Originally Posted by Dictionary.com
What is the difference between empathy and sympathy?
Both empathy and sympathy are feelings concerning other people. Sympathy is literally 'feeling with' - compassion for or commiseration with another person. Empathy, by contrast, is literally 'feeling into' - the ability to project one's personality into another person and more fully understand that person. Sympathy derives from Latin and Greek words meaning 'having a fellow feeling'. The term empathy originated in psychology (translation of a German term, c. 1903) and has now come to mean the ability to imagine or project oneself into another person's position and experience all the sensations involved in that position. You feel empathy when you've "been there", and sympathy when you haven't. Examples: We felt sympathy for the team members who tried hard but were not appreciated. / We felt empathy for children with asthma because their parents won't remove pets from the household.
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Empathy | Define Empathy at Dictionary.com
empathy
noun
1.
the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
2.
the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself
British Dictionary definitions
empathy
noun
1.
the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person's feelings See also identification (sense 3b)
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identification
noun
3. (psychol)
a. the process of recognizing specific objects as the result of remembering
b. the process by which one incorporates aspects of another person's personality See also empathy
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2.
the attribution to an object, such as a work of art, of one's own emotional or intellectual feelings about it
empathy in Medicine
n.
Direct identification with, understanding of, and vicarious experience of another person's situation, feelings, and motives.
The projection of one's own feelings or emotional state onto an object or animal.
empathy in Culture
Identifying oneself completely with an object or person, sometimes even to the point of responding physically, as when, watching a baseball player swing at a pitch, one feels one's own muscles flex.
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Based on this and on all the heated posts going around here, Aspies can be quite sympathetic, but empathy is a little more difficult. For those of you looking for more fuel to add to your "this article is BS" fire, most of the definitions do not make any requirement of action, except for the cultural one, and the wording of that one makes it seem like an occasional reaction even for neurotypicals.
So then what really is empathy? How can we know neurotypicals express it properly? How can we know that Aspies don't express it properly? The brain is a remarkably adaptive organ, as we've seen. How can one look at it and say that Aspie brains don't function properly when clearly they are functional human beings albeit a little unorthodox on the social and sometimes sensory sides? A Ford is a functional car just as Toyotas are functional cars. They are mostly just wired differently.
Another question: if NTs are so empathetic, then how is it that NTs seem to have no empathy with Aspies? (My hypothesis: NTs can sometimes sympathize, but not empathize, because apparently Aspies cannot project their personalities in a way that NTs can empathize with. It's a different language. I think some of these definitions sound a little bit like empathy is some form of subconscious astral projection.)
Now it's driving me nuts that so many people confuse those the terms "sympathy" and "empathy."