URB #516 — High-EQ Autism: Prevalence, Phenomenology, and Why It Mimics Low-EQ Social Pathology

The standard clinical picture of autism spectrum condition (ASC) emphasizes deficits in social cognition, reduced empathy, and difficulty reading emotional cues. This picture describes a real subset of the autistic population. However, a substantial and undercharacterized subset presents with the **inverse profile**: high emotional sensitivity (affective empathy), deep awareness of social dynamics, and acute capacity for emotional reading — combined with difficulty navigating those dynamics in real time, chronic social exhaustion, and outcomes (social isolation, relationship difficulty, vocational struggle) that look clinically identical to low-empathy autism from the outside. We term this profile **High-EQ Autism**. We review the empirical literature on: camouflaging/masking, empathy fragmentation in autism, 2e (twice-exceptional) profiles, and autistic burnout. We estimate High-EQ Autism may constitute 25-40% of the autistic population, with significant diagnostic underidentification — particularly in women, late-diagnosed adults, and individuals in intellectually demanding fields. The TI Sigma analysis: High-EQ Autism is TRALSE with respect to the low-EQ/high-EQ axis — it possesses both poles simultaneously, and the simultaneous possession is the source of its distinctive suffering.