To be frank, I was always surprised to read that some people associated autism with a “lack of empathy” or “empathy dysfunction”.
I know autism is a broad spectrum, meaning a “rule” that applies to one person doesn’t necessarily show up in another. But I’d noticed some loved ones with autism seemed to experience more empathy (or at least a more intense empathy) than average, not less.
In 2024, researchers found a high percentage of “hyper-empathy” among autistic people.
Here, we spoke to one of the study’s authors, Dr Stephen Connolly, a Senior Lecturer in Autism from the Sheffield Hallam Institute of Education, about his team’s findings.
Hyper-empathy is “an intense emotional response to people, plants, objects, animals, even fictional characters, often to the point of distress. It is intense, all-consuming thoughts and feelings that can make it hard for someone to distinguish their own feelings from another person’s.”
Sometimes, Dr Connolly said, this overwhelming hyper-empathy can be so intense that it can lead to vomiting, nausea, pain, agitation, crying, depression, anxiety, and burnout.
A person with hyper-empathy might even lose money over it. This can happen when “someone wants to pay to try resolve the problem such as taking in an animal from a shelter, paying for someone’s shopping, [or] replacing an item someone has lost or broken”.
And the trait could even cause issues in relationships, as people’s friends and family may wonder why “someone is seen as putting emotional resources into a damaged piece of furniture, an injured bird, or a homeless person but not their partner or friend… Some people can blame the hyper-empathic person for their responses, leading to breakdowns in relationships.”
Dr Connolly added that people with hyper-empathy might avoid situations that elicit this often extremely intense response.
Therefore, they might not “be willing to enter some environments or be there for people when they are needed.
“There is an immense emotional, cognitive and physical load attached to a hyper-empathic response that can be all-consuming. At best it can halt a person’s day, at worst it can lead to suicidal ideation.”
Dr Connolly’s research is not the only study to link autistic people with a greater likelihood of experiencing hyper-empathy.
“Early and growing research is suggesting it can be a fairly common response in autistic people, but understanding it can be difficult,” the lecturer told us.
“One of the challenges is that some people have talked about how they felt empathy so much they had to ‘shut it off,’” meaning that while their baseline levels of empathy might be very high, they could have adapted to hide it.
Meanwhile, many autistic people may have alexithymia, or difficulty naming, identifying, and/or expressing their own feelings.
Source: Read the original article on www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
