empathy amounted to. Kristen had her definition, which differed from the one in the dictionary, which contradicted my friends’ theories. And of course, none of those definitions could please the millions of contrarian bloggers I found when I searched for the term online—faceless people with names like CaptainHamwhistle who stay up nights rethinking their avatars and who themselves couldn’t define the concept yet insisted that any mainstream definition was not to be trusted.
With no clear definition of empathy, and no way of quantifying how much of it I had or didn’t have, I resorted to actual research to get to the bottom of things. I sequestered myself in Kristen’s office one evening while she was watching a movie—some tearjerker I had no business getting myself involved in. Beaches, I think it was. My first Internet search included the keywords empathy, Asperger, and syndrome, and the results were rather useless—confusing wiki threads, links to videos of purportedly clairvoyant house cats, that sort of thing. Then I added the word measuring to my search parameters, and within minutes I had all the answers I needed.
There were many results to choose from, but I started with an article titled “The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome,” which had been written by Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. (Leave it to renowned experts and leading researchers to really know what they’re talking about. No offense, CaptainHamwhistle.)
In the article, Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright spelled out in no uncertain terms—and I’m paraphrasing here—that my wife had been right all along. I do in fact have a measurable deficiency in empathic ability. My Empathy Quotient? Using Baron-Cohen’s method, I earned a meager fifteen points out of a possible eighty. That’s 19 percent. Talk about just barely giving a shit. The study’s control group—neurotypicals—averaged in the forties. (Interestingly, a second study revealed that among the general population, women scored significantly higher than men. A point that will come as no surprise to women.)
According to Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, empathy is “the drive or ability to attribute mental states to another person/animal, and entails an appropriate affective response in the observer to the other person’s mental state.” Hmm . I called up the stairs to Kristen, asking her what affective meant.
“Affective what?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just affective.”
“Relating to an emotional state,” she called.
Oh. Okay, this makes sense. I wrote the definition down in my notebook. So this is what I’m lacking!
Baron-Cohen’s first article inspired me to read more. In all the subsequent searches I made sure to include his name, and by the end of the evening I had a stack of clinical papers on the subject. I had empirical data rather than conjecture, which meant that I finally had answers.
What I gleaned from all this research is that empathy is the result of numerous cognitive and affective processes, all firing away behind the scenes somewhere in our brains. Cognitive processes allow us to understand the mental state of another person—his or her emotions, desires, beliefs, intentions, et cetera—which in turn helps us to understand and even predict the person’s actions or behaviors. They allow us to step outside of our own experience in order to take on and understand other people’s perspectives—something that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do. The affective component of empathy is more related to our emotional responses to the mental states that we observe in other people. This component allows us to feel some appropriate and non-egocentric emotional response to another person’s emotions—something else that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do.
Empathy involves both processes, and while they operate
With no clear definition of empathy, and no way of quantifying how much of it I had or didn’t have, I resorted to actual research to get to the bottom of things. I sequestered myself in Kristen’s office one evening while she was watching a movie—some tearjerker I had no business getting myself involved in. Beaches, I think it was. My first Internet search included the keywords empathy, Asperger, and syndrome, and the results were rather useless—confusing wiki threads, links to videos of purportedly clairvoyant house cats, that sort of thing. Then I added the word measuring to my search parameters, and within minutes I had all the answers I needed.
There were many results to choose from, but I started with an article titled “The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome,” which had been written by Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. (Leave it to renowned experts and leading researchers to really know what they’re talking about. No offense, CaptainHamwhistle.)
In the article, Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright spelled out in no uncertain terms—and I’m paraphrasing here—that my wife had been right all along. I do in fact have a measurable deficiency in empathic ability. My Empathy Quotient? Using Baron-Cohen’s method, I earned a meager fifteen points out of a possible eighty. That’s 19 percent. Talk about just barely giving a shit. The study’s control group—neurotypicals—averaged in the forties. (Interestingly, a second study revealed that among the general population, women scored significantly higher than men. A point that will come as no surprise to women.)
According to Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, empathy is “the drive or ability to attribute mental states to another person/animal, and entails an appropriate affective response in the observer to the other person’s mental state.” Hmm . I called up the stairs to Kristen, asking her what affective meant.
“Affective what?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just affective.”
“Relating to an emotional state,” she called.
Oh. Okay, this makes sense. I wrote the definition down in my notebook. So this is what I’m lacking!
Baron-Cohen’s first article inspired me to read more. In all the subsequent searches I made sure to include his name, and by the end of the evening I had a stack of clinical papers on the subject. I had empirical data rather than conjecture, which meant that I finally had answers.
What I gleaned from all this research is that empathy is the result of numerous cognitive and affective processes, all firing away behind the scenes somewhere in our brains. Cognitive processes allow us to understand the mental state of another person—his or her emotions, desires, beliefs, intentions, et cetera—which in turn helps us to understand and even predict the person’s actions or behaviors. They allow us to step outside of our own experience in order to take on and understand other people’s perspectives—something that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do. The affective component of empathy is more related to our emotional responses to the mental states that we observe in other people. This component allows us to feel some appropriate and non-egocentric emotional response to another person’s emotions—something else that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do.
Empathy involves both processes, and while they operate
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