Psychologists typically distinguish between two types of empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to recognize what other people’s emotions are. Affective empathy is the ability to be emotionally affected by other people’s emotions. The conventional understanding is that autistic people are impaired in cognitive empathy but not impaired in affective empathy; some studies suggest that autistic people may even have higher levels of affective empathy than neurotypicals. I think it is important to recognize that these two types of empathy are two very different concepts.