8. Finally – this could have been a blog post! – under ‘Limitations’, the authors identify four caveats, one of which suggests further research to link ‘subjective reports of discomfort with neural activity patterns during eye gaze’

That is, they want to make sure we actually *are* uncomfortable with what they’re doing!

But they also doubt it would really tell them anything useful because of ‘the potential limitations of self-reports in a condition that is very often associated with alexithymia’

Very conveniently for them, it seems we’re not reliable witnesses of our own feelings!

In the last paragraph under ‘Limitations’, the authors talk about potential clinical implications ‘despite these caveats’:

‘… during behavioral therapy, forcing individuals with autism to look in the eyes might be counterproductive and elicit more anxiety …’

They had me at ‘during behavioral therapy’ – behavioural ‘therapy’ (ABA, PBS etc.) is abuse, akin to conversion ‘therapy’

’… however, by not looking at the eyes, the person with ASD will continue to miss critical social information, …’

Again, critical for whom?

‘… and somehow one has to help them to gather all these important cues.’

Oh great, so it’s up to the neurotypicals to ‘somehow’ help us do something we don’t want to do

‘One possible strategy could consist in progressively habituating individuals with ASD to look into the eyes, analogous to the way surgeons habituate to look at open bleeding bodies, and then in incentivizing them to look at the eyes, finding a way to make eye contact somehow less stressful.’

WTF?!

And on that note, I’ll leave it

#ActuallyAutistic #ableism #DoubleEmpathy

7. In the Discussion section:

‘In everyday life, [oversensitivity to socio-affective stimuli] may lead to attempts to decrease one’s arousal levels, and first-hand reports suggest that simply avoiding to attend to the eyes of others is one common strategy among individuals with ASD.’

It’s a very good strategy! Works for me anyway

(Here btw is another reference to the listicle in The Mighty, suggesting the authors hadn’t directly engaged with the Autistic community at all!)

The paragraph continues:

‘Such a strategy is unlikely, however, to come without costs, since the eyes carry *important interpersonal and deictic information* during social interaction and communication, …’

Important to whom??

‘… and eye-avoidance may result in cascading effects leading to *improper development of the social brain*’

Improper development? By what standard of propriety?

#ActuallyAutistic #ableism #DoubleEmpathy

The NimStim database was validated by 81 participants, 51 female and 30 male, aged 18–35, with over 70% being European American – a mixture of 34 New Yorkers and 47 undergraduates from a Midwestern US liberal arts college

Validation used a forced-choice method: the participants had to choose one of the eight facial expression terms (‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’, ‘fearful’, ‘surprised’, ‘disgusted’, ‘neutral’ and ‘calm’) that the actors had been given, or ‘none of the above’, for each face in the database

I’ll skip over the statistical analysis – mainly because it would take me too long to understand it! – but I see a couple of potentially significant problems

First, as noted in the paper, these are posed photographs

People are pretty bad at judging emotions from context-free still images (see e.g. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25352-6)

And a professional actor portraying a static emotion is likely to produce a relatively unnatural performance

Second, there’s the double empathy problem (https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62639/): specifically, why should Autistic people be expected to read emotions from facial expressions validated by neurotypical people?

Why do I say they were neurotypical?

I can’t be 100% sure, but it’s the word *healthy*: the validators are described as ‘untrained, healthy adult research participants’

Am I wrong to assume that ‘healthy’ is code for neurotypical here?

[2/2]

#DoubleEmpathy #NimStimDB #FacialExpression

@KitOz

That study on brain synchronicity is interesting.

I can't wait for someone to try it out on #ActuallyAutistic people as a way of exploring the #DoubleEmpathy problem.

The part about greater synchronicity between creatures with a strong sense of their place in the status hierarchy was especially intriguing.

Is it bad that I'd be kind of horrified if my brain didn't show itself resistant to synchronizing with most folks ?!? 🤦‍♀️

@joshsusser @roryreckons that is a major oversight! Quite odd. They do cite Noah Sasson on thin-slice judgements, so they can't have been *totally* unaware of the #doubleEmpathy problem.

Great topic though! Looks like really useful research, I'm a little surprised I missed it at the time.

@KaCi @actuallyautistic yes!

If you haven't read @scrappapertiger's 'When everyone is speaking a different language' I think you might appreciate it very much; it's on exactly this theme.

#Alexithymia #creativity #doubleEmpathy
https://link.medium.com/aAoL6bho2wb

#Autism #Autistic #DoubleEmpathy #Autists #Allists #GoodPlace
@milton_damian

This is a sensitively-written and hugely insightful article by @ferrous

‘I think we can all learn something from Elon Musk: from his failures, and from the costs of his successes. Only some of that has much to do with autism, but the parts that do, provide a powerful cautionary tale for autistic people who want to make the world a better place’

https://oolong.medium.com/elon-musks-autistic-anti-patterns-5a96111ef28f

#ActuallyAutistic #autism #Aspergers #AspieSupremacy #eugenics #neurodiversity #AntiPatterns #DoubleEmpathy #empathy

1/3 Natureconnection and #Autism.
As an #autistic person, I struggle a lot with connections with other human beings. #DoubleEmpathy really is a problem.
Not so with nature. Nature does not pretend or play social games. She is always there without judgement. There is always something new to discover and there is always a tree to hug.
It is not an exaggeration for me to say that #natureconnection routines really helped me a lot, many times.

This video below was featured on the Scottish #MentalHealth festival in 2021. It tells you much of my natureconnection journey

https://vimeo.com/354498045

RT @CommonSenseSLT@twitter.com

/1 I loathe the 'power' titles schools use to motivate at the best of times. Honestly, who do they inspire? But, going with the flow, let's put a #FlipTheNarrative perspective on these, showing awareness of #DoubleEmpathy. @MrTs_NQTs@twitter.com @NotFineinSchool@twitter.com @AT_Autism@twitter.com @naomicfisher@twitter.com https://twitter.com/_MissingTheMark/status/1603442157892796417

@lauraklein Preach! Sometimes I want to just hand them a pamphlet about the #DoubleEmpathy problem and walk away.

@theautisticcoach I was just thinking how we autistics tend to put more into cross-neurotype friendships and get less from them than our allistic counterparts. Seems like we usually have fewer active friendships, so they're all pretty important to us. But it's easy for us to feel like we're not important to them - that darn #DoubleEmpathy problem confounds so much. I'd say if you have an autistic friend and want to be a good friend to them, think of them like they're one or two levels higher on the friendship ladder than you usually would for how much time you spend with them. We're worth the effort.

Further to @shengokai and their discussion of the use of quote tweets as 'call and response' i'd like to put forward a defence of them in light of how autistic people communicate empathy.

we do this by relating an incident we feel relates to or, to some extent, mirrors the experience of the person we are talking to. to deny us this is to limit our ability to communicate.

#Autism #Empathy #DoubleEmpathy #AutisticCommunication #Accessability

For anyone interested in Gemma Williams’s talk on #RelevanceTheory and #DoubleEmpathy, it’s now available on YouTube

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zUBUrm7KV3Y

As an #ActuallyAutistic linguist, I’m enjoying the AMASE #LinguisticsAndAutistics talk by Gemma Williams looking at the implications of #RelevanceTheory to the #DoubleEmpathy problem

It’s hard to get an understanding of things like the #DoubleEmpathy problem out there without having a huge reach, says Pete

That probably means government (hmm) or mainstream media (which doesn’t platform ND people)

For anyone who who’d like to hear Monique Botha’s brilliant talk from yesterday, it’s now available on YouTube

cc: @masukomi, @darckcrystale, @edyother

#ActuallyAutistic #autoethnography #AutismResearch #DoubleEmpathy

TW: dehumanising and stigmatising of Autistic people by autism researchers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5PocitlgLI