1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

It is quite possible, if not likely, that Charlie did NOT have #1. There are other very good explanations, such as disliking the sound, reacting to the angry voice without a thought to the other child, or such. What you are doing is more akin to #2 but more like “projecting” because Charlie is a person. But that’s OK because the difficulty in empathy cuts both ways. It’s going to be tough for you to understand Charlie’s POV. That isn’t to say you can’t learn it well enough to guess, just as Charlie can learn to guess by having an NT’s reasoning explicitly explained to him. Of course this is an ability that comes with age. Particularly in the range of reaching late teens (there are physiological changes in the brain that occur). So it isn’t particularly easy for any child to have a very deep understanding of another person’s feelings.

Empathy (#1 definition) implies a deep understanding of someone else’s state of mind. The larger the difference in how your mind works from the target the harder it becomes because the more synthetic and simulated the formation of this understanding is.

Those are the REAL myths:
1) That an NT empathizing for someone on the spectrum is naturally accurate.
2) That the apparent lower level of empathy by someone on the spectrum is all about a vast difference in ability within someone on the spectrum than an NT.

Now sympathy, with the connotations of compassion, was slower coming or maybe harder to discern…but we have seen that as well. She used to laugh when someone got hurt, then later, cried, and now comforts or checks to see if the person is going to be okay…it’s still somewhat idiosyncratic, but is there.

My opinion of one is that it is very possible to develop empathy, if it is not already there but being demonstrated in an idiosyncratic manner. I have certainly met my share of typical people who at least superficially seem to lack some degree of empathy, and, sympathy, for that matter.

I am interested in the whole issue of recall/learning because my brother has been in one specific situation—one in which he has rejected or rebuffed gifts or expressed genuine disappointment over them—probably a hundred times. And a hundred times has not allowed him to make one dent in his management of this situation from the standpoint of addressing the feelings of the giver. And I am not trying to say that my brother is not disturbed by his own management of the situation, because he is—because hie senses people are disturbed by his reaction. A couple of days ago it happened again and he wrote to me that he wanted this situation fixed for good. (At those times, I realize how very difficult it is to be my brother.) But that’s one example where the information does not seem be processed even logically, as in “OK—here’s the damned gift-giving situation again. . .what did I learn last time? I’d better just say thank you even if I don’t like it.”

Thanks for letting me ramble.

Your brother may not be clueless about how people operate as much as being way too sensitized to emotion in general in some ways, but also compensating by viewing it “logically,” which can come across as unfeeling. When you’re overwhelmed, you tend to present as clumsy, clueless, deer in the headlights, flat affect, rude, too blunt, etc., when what you’re really doing is tamping everything down to a flatline, just trying to keep it all in.

Certainly, the whole “autistics can’t empathize” is a serious issue, and probably endemic of the whole “autistics can’t” notion, anyway (where I’d say that there was no solid essentialism on what one can or can’t do with autism, but rather in broader tendencies instead).

Cliff