Science

Autistic person here:

I often ask people how they are feeling. Even though 90% of the time I can correctly tell by changes in a person's behavior, language, facial expressions, intonation, etc, I am aware that I can't literally read minds and the most obvious solution to this is just ask.

The 90% correct guessing figure comes from asking people and validating or invalidating my guess.

However, in at least my personal experience, neurotypicals almost never read my emotions correctly, will tell me how I am feeling, and essentially never ask. If they do ask, they will often get frustrated by how complex my emotions are, to the point that they vastly oversimplify to the point of caricature.

Then they go on to do or say things based on how they think I feel or felt and functionally spread lies about me constantly, which I am constantly bewildered by.

I would say that I am far more empathetic than most neurotypicals I meet or know, far more likely to spend my time and energy being emotionally available for them than they do for me, far less likely to assume my initial impression is correct, far more likely to truly engage.

As to the increased suicidality of Autistic people yeah that tracks with my lived experience.

Not in that I've personally considered suicide, but I am in constant tension of wanting to communicate with people vs essentially always being misinterpreted.

So I've just grown to be more and more content with mostly being alone.

Basically everyone I ever once thought I loved or trusted has been so utterly incapable of giving me 10% of the emotional support or availability that I feel I give them that I've learned that most people will exploit me and then scream at or assault me or have some kind of total emotional breakdown which they then blame me for whenever I am able to tell them how I feel.

Its beyond exhausting.

As an example that happens frequently to me: I also have a form of neuropathy, which often causes me to be in extreme amounts of pain for no obviously visible reason. I will tell people, I am not angry with you, I am in extreme pain, I have neuropathy, and they will just say no you aren't, no you don't you're just angry for (insert projection of their own insecurity here).

The article is based on a study in Autism for which it doesn’t give a link, title, date, or authors. After searching that journal, I believe the source study is this: Non-autistic observers both detect and demonstrate the double empathy problem when evaluating interactions between autistic and non-autistic adults (Jones, D. R., Botha, M., Ackerman, R. A., King, K., & Sasson, N. J., Dec 2023).

This has been pretty widely discussed under the name "the double empathy problem", although as always it's good to have more actual data. The general gist in the existing discussion is that autistic people and allistic people have trouble with each other's communication styles, but this is treated as a communication deficit in autistic people rather than two different styles that have difficulty understanding each other. An analogy might be a minority that (poorly) speaks the language of the majority, and then is considered stupid despite the fact that they are bilingual and none of the people they're speaking to have made an effort to learn the minority language.

I wasn't sure to what extent this was autistic community in-group jargon, so I spent time trying to loosely explain it, when it turns out that a quick Google to check whether I'm crazy indicates it's pretty well established and I could probably have just linked the Wikipedia page.

Tl;Dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

Man, that's super useful information, directly so, and it explains a lot of issues I've had communicating with the autism support group that uses the same space as my chronic pain support group.

Now, I'd never thought they didn't have empathy, because plenty of them expressed it verbally, once something was verbally communicated to them. But it could be difficult to discuss things when emotions were high, and that's pretty common when timing means they're coming in as we're going out, and we've got members visibly upset, but only to people that can read emotion visually.

Makes so much sense out of things.

Legit, even if this information only helps this one situation to bridge the gap between a single neurotypical/neurodivergent interaction case, that's amazing.

So the ovious question is: how good are autistic people at reading the feelings of other autistic people?