 Good afternoon and welcome to the Asperger's Growth Channel, the home for all of you auties out there and for you neurotypicals of course. We're an all-inclusive channel here and I'm Thomas Henley. I'm here to talk to you today about autism and psychopathy, two very different things sharing similar qualities in a different way. This video is something that I've been wanting to talk about for a while now. It's something that's quite interesting. The reason why I found it quite interesting is because growing up as an autistic person, your brain is different as many of you know, as many of you can imagine and so the way that we relate to people is very different as well. In a lot of times in my life I have questioned my own sanity. I've questioned whether I have the ability to understand and relate to another human being. With autism there are a lot of those social components that are a little bit blurry, a little bit difficult to understand and work with. Furthermore there are many many many many misconceptions about autism and empathy. Of course there is a lot of literature on empathy, in psychopathy and autism but how and in what ways are they different from each other. I have done so many psychopath and sociopath tests that I cannot count on my ten fingers because it's more than that of course. My girlfriend has also given me an insider's perspective and some of the groups on Facebook and some of the social media sites. The one thing that seems to pop up is that people who are dating autistic people sort of quote a lack of empathy, a lack of understanding, a lack of feeling, anything you know, any sort of emotion towards them or towards things that happen in their life or things that happen in their partner's life you know. And so there's a lot of confusion around that. Autism and psychopathy also quite weirdly share very similar rates of coincidence. I think now for autism it's about two percent maybe psychopathy is like around that number. Something very similar to each other so I guess you know there are a lot of ways that these two conditions are similar but as I will get into eventually with the video there are many many ways that they are different and that is the important thing to highlight. Let's first address empathy. What is it? Empathy is a very blanket term. You know most people think that empathy is this monolithic single thing that either people can have or they can't have but in reality from some of the psychological and scientific research empathy has generally been split into two categories. Cognitive empathy and adaptive empathy. Both of these are very different. Cognitive empathy is the ability to imagine what someone else is thinking or feeling whereas adaptive empathy is the ability to act appropriately to that emotion, to someone's experience, to someone's negative feelings, to someone's positive feelings. They're very different concepts. They're very different things. They're both types of empathy but they differ in some very very large ways. So let's talk about autism. I have had the pleasure to talk with one of the leading autism researchers in the UK. Mr, I'm not going to say Mr, it's actually Sir, Sir Baron Cohen. Yes he is, you've probably heard that name before. It's not Sasha Baron Cohen but he is related to him. He's a cousin and he is a big figure in autism research. Sure he's had a lot of controversy around what is considered being neurogendering but he's done a lot of useful and productive work around empathy. He's delivered a few talks on it and he's recently been on my podcast and we've talked all about the different aspects of empathy. Sure I knew a lot about it at the start but it was just good to kind of confirm it with someone who has been a large player in that. Popularized by Lorna Wing quoting a lack of empathy. There is a large social stigma around autistic people not being empathetic and I think that is generally caused by that misconception around empathy. Autistic people generally are lower in cognitive empathy meaning it's hard to understand situations so understand people's emotions, imagine what they may be thinking or feeling and so it can make the social landscape quite difficult. You know a lot of social anxiety, a lot of misunderstandings, a lot of negative experiences but the difference is that autistic people show adaptive empathy. They have a normal ability to show adaptive empathy in general and innate ability. You know something that you're born with. Many autistic people have cognitive empathy but it's usually something that's built up as a skill and not just a god-given trait usually. The best example of this I can give is through my work as a teacher. I used to work one-to-one with autistic children and I've kind of realised from that work the ways that I am different from autistic children. I mean there's a lot of different things that I differ but one of the ways is that they really don't understand when they've hurt them, hurt somebody either emotionally, socially or physically and they usually sort of continue to sort of ignore it and push it aside and not recognise it as something of significance and generally that is a problem with cognitive empathy but when you make them aware of it either by exaggerating your facial expressions and playing into the oh no I'm kind of you've hurt me stereotype and once they're aware of it then they're usually even more willing to try and help to try and solve this situation to try and mend it. So that's a good comparison point of the different types of empathy. You know one is a difficulty understanding and one is a difficulty acting but once autistic people know what the situation is then they act accordingly and usually due to the amount of trauma and amount of bullying and low life quality things that we experience we tend to show a lot of adaptive empathy. So let's talk about the psychopaths. Those nasty horrible people. The ones that we don't like to talk about but still exist in society. It's sort of for me they sort of appear in a sort of movie characters in my head you know I can't imagine talking to a psychopath you know it just seems so far removed from my reality as a person but the main ways that autistic people differ from psychopathic people people with psychopathy is that people who are psychopaths have sort of an inverse profile to autistic people they tend to be very high in cognitive empathy so they can understand people they know what they're thinking and feeling usually to a very high degree but they lack the adaptive component they are very self-driven they do not care about other people and they do not show appropriate responses to to those emotions and to those states of mind that people are in unless it's it's some form of advantage or camouflage it is the inverse of that autistic being low in cognitive high and adaptive psychopaths low in adaptive high in cognitive and those are some of the really key differences because they do matter and they are very important to highlight. Psychopaths can use their cognitive empathy to manipulate people to get themselves higher in certain workplaces to commit crimes without being noticed or known about even and that's because they have a keen sense for how people are thinking and feeling and they use that to their advantage they manipulate the situation they employ all sorts of psychological tactics in order to get what they want from a person they don't care about the feelings they don't care about what happens to them they don't care about if they're in pain as long as they are enjoying it as long as they are gaining in some way from it they will do it and that's a massive difference so let's go over some of the common things that people say about autistic people and how they compare to real psychopathy real lack of care for people real lack of empathy or adaptive empathy if you if it be one key and important difference is that autistic people generally have very high moral standards they stick very neatly to that moral code that they have whether that's to do with laws or whether that's to do with their own feelings and thoughts on the world they tend to stick to that moral code so you may have cases where autistic people are more likely to be whistleblowers more likely to call people out on behaviors that that maybe are against the law but maybe not you know it's pretty socially acceptable in a certain group and you know for any group of people who stick to those moral codes and have them very glued into their life it's hard to to to view them as people who are who are likely to do some of the things that psychopaths do on the other side of the the coin on the other side of the coin you have psychopaths they don't care about laws they don't care about moral codes they will break them if there is no repercussions for them they will do whatever they like they're incredibly self-driven they have a high amount of self-interest and a complete lack of care for all of these social structures that we have in place these laws that guide acceptable human behavior another key point that is perhaps alluded to a lot either by parents or partners of autistic people is that they generally show a lack of interest they show a lack of emotion i don't know what the word is emotional riproposity something along those lines they don't react in the way that most people would and sometimes it comes off as a lack of care you know for for what someone's experiencing but the problem is is that this isn't a lack of care this is a lack of expression for me personally when someone's telling me something that's negative that's happened to them sometimes i may forget to express it on the outside they may be listening intently and you know trying to feel what they may be feeling and try to empathize with them but it doesn't necessarily reflect that on this group of muscles this group of facial muscles i have on my face and that's sometimes a problem because that kind of gets misconstrued as not caring whereas psychopaths they can be very expressive and they will use that and they may feign interest and and understanding and empathy for their own advantage but they don't feel it they don't care autistic people may care and in a lot of cases if someone's going through trauma or bereavement or something horrible like mental health they're likely to be empathetic towards that person at least on a cerebral level inside they may care a lot they may do things to try and help them to make them feel better to do anything in their power to make them feel better about a certain situation and that's something that that maybe isn't expressed and to many outlookers many people who are in relationships with autistic people whether it be friendships family romantic relationships they may misconstrued that lack of expression for lack of care and that is sometimes a problem autistic people have been quite commonly labelled as blunt as uncaring as you know whatever kind of bad social awkward you know all of those bad social words that we have for people autistic people generally tend to get the blunt of that which is a bit ironic considering what we're talking about and yeah i mean in general from my own experience talking to a variety of autistic people they tend to be a bit more blunt more direct but the problem is is that when someone who's not accustomed to that talks to an autistic person and then blunt and direct that can get misconstrued as being rude as not caring about what they have to say and you know just being a bit too direct and making you too uncomfortable and that's a problem you know it's it's a difference in how we communicate how we're brought up how our brain develops the different ways that we socialize with with fellow human beings there are many ways that we differ but it doesn't mean that that innate difficulty with socializing means that they are intentionally trying to cause you discomfort they're intentionally trying to make you feel like they don't care that's a key difference a key point rather to stick on stick on this is the problem filming multiple videos at once it's good for me it's good you know i can just get them done and edit them over a few weeks but sometimes it's not so great especially when he's staring at a ring for like hours hours and hours it's only been about an hour and a half it's not too bad so mr bond i i hope you have enjoyed this video i hope that it has cleared up a lot of the misconceptions that you may have and i don't blame you understanding autism is hard it's a complex thing it's not easily taken to it's a different brain it's it's a different set of personality traits it's a it's a whole host of different things so mr bond i hope that it's not mr bond that sosten powers one million dollars i hope that you will give me one million dollars for this video i hope this has cleared up any questions that you had about this topic i have not seen anything on this on youtube even though it's something that stood out for me or has stand stood out for me for a long time so i hope that this information has cleared things up for you and i hope that if you have a relationship in in any way with an autistic person that this can bring to light that yes they do feel empathy they may find it hard to imagine what you're thinking and feeling but it doesn't mean that they don't feel empathy it's just a difference and the more that we can talk about things like this i hope uh the more that things like this won't so circulate and become an issue in different relationship groups on facebook i mean of course autistic people feel empathy we're not psychopaths anyway i hope you have enjoyed this video as i said and if you want to follow my other work my media work the podcast maybe fortuity podcast available on spotify and apple podcasts or you want to check out the social medias that i have that's all at asperge's growth easy to find facebook twitter and instagram go check them out if you want to of course and um yeah let me know what you think did you have you learned anything from this video do you have anything to add on the differences between these very widely varying conditions do you have any personal opinions on this topic do you have any experiences has this cleared up things in your relationship with an autistic person let me know i always like to hear from people and i always like to hear that some good is coming out of me talking to a camera it's always lovely to hear as a creator i hope you have enjoyed and if you have stick around check out some other videos and god forbid like the video i mean everyone knows about it but nobody talks about it you know when you just get really concentrated on something really into making these videos and bashing them out as like wildfire but i i've need i've needed we for like i don't know like an hour or something it's still not going can't break myself out of this little youtubeing mode that i'm in it'll pass and my bladder will burst until fill and become a balloon and it will fly off into the solar system and to the stars and through the cosmos waiting to relieve my you know what i'm gonna scratch this