Do people with Aspergers lack empathy?
Yes. But they don’t lack sympathy. There’s a difference. Sympathy is being able to understand what another person is feeling and to care about that person’s feeling – to be able to replicate the feeling internally in order to generate that caring. Empathy is being able to understand another’s feeling without being specifically told about it, and then being able to convey the understanding and care to the other person in a manner they will understand. People with Asperger’s often care deeply about another’s feeling, but lack the means to express it in a conventional fashion. Sometimes we only care after it has quite literally been explained to us in detail how another person feels. Even when we do understand and care, our lack of social skills and poor non-verbal communication prohibit us from expressing it as NTs do, leading them to believe we simply do not care. It is true that sometimes we actually don’t care. But that is only because it never occurred to us that we were supposed to.
