Do autistic people have empathy?

The myth that autistic people lack empathy is one of the most damaging and inaccurate ideas about autism. The reality is more complex, and more interesting.

What the research shows: autistic people often have intense affective empathy, feeling others' emotions deeply, sometimes overwhelmingly so. What can differ is cognitive empathy, the ability to quickly infer what someone else is thinking or feeling from subtle nonverbal cues. That automatic inference may be less automatic for autistic people.

Double empathy (a concept from Damian Milton): the difficulty in mutual understanding between autistic and non-autistic people goes both ways. Non-autistic people also struggle to understand the perspectives and emotions of autistic people, but historically only the autistic side has been labeled an empathy deficit.

Many autistic people describe experiencing extremely intense empathy, feeling others' pain almost physically, and being deeply affected by others' suffering. Alexithymia (difficulty identifying and naming one's own emotions), which is common in autism, can make it harder to express empathy in a way neurotypical people recognize, even when the feeling itself is intense.

In short: autistic people do have empathy, often a great deal of it. What can differ is how it is processed and expressed.