[LaurieKoudstaal]

Simon Baron-Cohen's book Zero Degrees of Empathy explores this very idea. Might be worth a read if you're curious.

[DanBC]

He's wrong though. Alexithymia is more common in autistic people, but it's neither suffient nor required for an ASD diagnosis.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-autis...

This linking of alexithymia to autism has caused harm by making it harder to get the diagnosis for people who can recognise emotion within themselves and others.

[0xcde4c3db]

We need better constructs for this. Alexithymia is typically defined entirely in terms of whether someone can identify emotions, regardless of the underlying failure mode. In particular, some clinicians seem to think that everyone has the same baseline interoceptive experience and that any problem with identifying emotions is therefore purely a problem of attention or vocabulary.

[LaurieKoudstaal]

I did not realize. Thanks for the correction.

[piazz]

Looks fascinating - I’ve added it to the list. Thanks for the recommendation.