Find a therapist to help with autism

Cultural norms influence what we recognize as empathy.

When autistic people show care in ways that differ from cultural conventions, we may misinterpret it.

Some autistic people express care through problem-solving, sharing a similar experience, or being direct.

Asking what someone meant before drawing conclusions can help avoid misunderstandings.

This article was written in collaboration with Tristan Lavender.Most Western cultures teach specific rules for expressing empathy. Do these sound familiar? Don’t try to fix the problem. Don’t offer advice. Don’t respond to someone’s story with a similar story of your own. Instead, listen and stay with the other person’s experience. Active listening guidance sometimes teaches these rules explicitly (University of Iowa, n.d.).

That can be helpful advice. But when we treat empathy as something that can only be expressed according to a fixed set of rules, we leave no room for people who convey care and concern differently. For autistic people specifically, that means having their ways of expressing empathy misread or dismissed.

Empathy Is Culturally Shaped

Cultural psychology has clearly established that perceptions and expected forms of caring vary across cultures. In one study, European Americans reported providing more emotion-focused than problem-focused support, while Japanese participants showed exactly the opposite (Chen et al., 2012). Research has also distinguished explicit support, such as seeking advice and emotional comfort, from implicit support, such as finding relief in the fact of connection to valued social groups. In one series of studies, Asian and Asian-American study participants benefited more from implicit support, while European Americans benefited more from explicit support (Taylor et al., 2007).

In other words, how people communicate and receive care is culturally shaped, which makes the assumption that there........

© Psychology Today