Email from WP to ARC request debate on WP with S.B Cohen.

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My EQ score is very low (bottom 0.6 percentile) and my empathy is seriously lacking. Some of us do fit their hypothesis.

Cash are there any times you don't fit their hypothesis?

For example- for most of his life was Johnny Cash a happy man?

Not trying to use you to prove a point, I'm genuinely interested in what you think and feel about this.

I am actually not that familiar with most of their research. I am not sure where being happy and being empathy impaired go together. Is that one of their hypothesis? Because I would disagree with that. As a child I was generally happy but very impaired when it came to empathy. As an adult I am still generally happy most the time and my empathy has gotten better, but I would still say impaired. Not near like when I was a kid though.

As a possible side related note. I was seriously abused as a child and as a result I got very emotionally hard and blocked up. This may play into the whole empathy factor also. You do learn certain behaviors when you are getting the proverbial cr@p kicked out of you regularly. Thinking about that I may not be the best person to try to make a point of empathy on because I had other factors going on.

It absolutely does. The same applies for kids that go to school and get bullied. If it happens enough one can lose emotion and feelings of empathy. There is plenty of research that backs that up.

I think empathy is related to happiness, as far as the good feelings that some receive from human connection, that those that don't experience the affective part of empathy take part in. Joy and sadness are shared in affective empathy, so it is a relative issue depending on whom one is around. For one that is consistently around sad or angry people, the ability to not become too empathetically involved is sometimes a necessity for good mental health.

People don't gain their happiness from the human empathetic response alone. And some that don't feel a great deal of empathy for humans experience it freely with animals and the rest of nature. Happiness, too is in the eye of the beholder, one person's heaven is another person's hell.

Since we know that empathy is affected by so many variables in life, I don't see how we can be sure that any autistic person inherently lacks the ability for empathy, or has lacked it their entire life. It could be that that the experience of empathy is so intense as a developing child, that, that is the reason a child sometimes escapes into themselves and withdraws from the world.

Recent research also suggest that too much empathy can be troublesome as indicated in Cohen's counter theory of an extreme female brain.

It's complicated stuff. Not the kind of thing that can be systematically understood on a consistent basis, I think, in even one individual. Too many variables affect empathy, other than the fact that someone has been diagnosed with Autism.

If one were to measure empathy, somewhat lower, on average in Aspergers, as Cohen's research suggests, it seems like it would and should probably be expected based on the difficulties in human social interaction common among those that are diagnosed.

A lack of empathy can cause problems with social interaction and problems with social interaction can cause a reduction in empathy. How in the world can anyone state for sure where the cycle started, or even come close, other than the specific individual that is currently being measured as having reduced empathy?

aghogday - your posts are well-articulated and lucid. What you've written make a lot of sense to me, thankyou for that.

Interesting discussion all round, thanks memesplice.

Thank you Nier.

Progress Report.

Well, I have been following this up. I have found a forum where there are people who work in there kind of professions. Most of them are OK .They have been discussing empathy and evil recently and have a broad range of understanding of the issues behind it. I have asked for SBC to be debated in this forum, and received a good deal of support.

(As a side note: someone has screwed their forum so the text doesn't work properly and they can't make links without messing- so if anyone can give them a fix, it would be a nice gift.)

They are different from us because of the way the invest social significance in politics and it seems to have much more to do with their sense of self than taking rational approaches.

It can get confusing and shouting - Ci versus the world x 1000. and they don't have any icons to reinforce intended meaning.

We get someone who holds different views and set those secondary to person. Things get nasty sometimes in their forum when they forget . I will use the term NT because it is helpful for me here - online they weirdly seem to have less of a group identity than we do , for this reason. By this I mean we know we are a group of individuals if that makes sense.

Most are very "kindly" . I lowered any aggression response shields and they did not attack , in fact the opposite is more correct to state.This may reflect the professions they work in and clustering of personality types. I am seriously impressed by some of their responses: For example @reynardmandrake- is a good storyteller . I am even thinking of asking her, and some other's to come here and maybe tell some stories with the LFA's who like writing stories and being read to, if they are really down .


In the empathy tests towards AS they scored higher than I had imagined. It is a different kind of empathy though . For example they tend to more group orientated than we are in certain circumstances , then it appears to be more about maintaining group identity than developing ideas. The other night a troll attacked and they went crazy at him , and you could observe the group working more as perhaps a team than here.-

I do not know how much closer we are to getting this debate
but they are discussing the issues.

Will update soon.

edited

Last edited by mntn13 on 24 Sep 2011, 10:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

I didn't read the thread all the way through past the first page so I guess might have missed updates. Seriously doubt Baron-Cohen would engage since that means he'd have to retract a lot of what he's based his career on. Wonder if Tony Atwood or Oliver Sacks would be more likely targets based on their interactions with Temple Grandin.
I just got involved with this group called AASPIRE which does community based participatory research with autism community which means community gets to approve and comment on all research done. Seems like there are a lot of fledging researchers coming through (myself included) that are more likely to make an impact than Baron-Cohen actually engaging (though during his interview with Autism Women's Network could tell that he was thinking over things he was asked...

May I suggest we check the level of understanding of NT's, It's my belief that they are reality blind, as they use gossip to understand their world and not facts. Regards first contact, food seems to be a major player in their routines, perhaps a plate of 'chockywocky' will smooth the negotiations. We could pat them on the head and feed them at the same time, thus reassuring them that we mean them no harm.

I got that pic from a forum thread with ISTP MTBI types. Anyway, it seems pretty much all the ISTPs are scoring abysmally low. I scored 14, pretty much everyone else scored like that, too, with some people scoring like 7, 9, etc. We all scored below 20, pretty much.

http://personalitycafe.com/istp-forum-m ... uiz-1.html

Wasn't Cohen partly responsible for dispelling the myth that autistics lack empathy? Theory of Mind deficits are not even remotely comparable to the genuine lack of empathy found in sociopathy.

Why do autistics dislike this guy? I'm not defending him, I just think I missed something.

I don't think people dislike him, I just think this thread is to ask him to contribute to our debate. But I think there is a contentious issue about the empathy thing. But I could be wrong.

I want to first state that I didn't bother to go through all 4 pages, so my thought that what you initially wrote is both appropriate and HI-larious may come too little too late...

However, what I really wanted to state is that when I was first approached with the hypothesis that I has Asperger's, I naturally started reading all about AS. I bought Tony Attwood's (if I misspelled or incorrectly listed his name, I really don't care) book and make it most of the way through before becoming utterly disgusted with how he wrote about AS - he made us sound like some form of inferior lab rat meant to be dissected and disposed of. I stopped reading his book and switched primarily to books written by people with AS or NT's who wrote about their AS loved ones as those books made people with AS sound human.

It's funny that you say that. I found Attwood's book to be extremely helpful and he is a long time supporter of the Neurodiversity movement.

He has tremendous respect for autistic individuals, and speaks often of autism being a vital component of human evolution.

I'm really not sure how you came to these conclusions.

Alex asked me to interview Cohen for the homepage, so I left him a message. Hopefully I will hear from him soon.

I may have to read through this thread to see what you guys are interested in asking him. Ugh, long thread.

I do want the interview to address the specific interests of our online community here.

I've also contacted some leading professionals in autism research. Expect some stimulating stuff to pop up on the homepage.

Last edited by Tambourine-Man on 21 Nov 2011, 12:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

While I can admit that my initial impression of his book may be clouded by my feelings and processes going through accepting that I was not "normal" I will state that I was already quite familiar with Temple Grandin as I was an Agriculture Major and we studied some of her work (and I had already read through her book while in college). After taking a few of the online tests I bought Attwood's book. After reading some of the items in the book (particularly parts about relationships) I found 2 other books ('Asperger Syndrome and Long-term relationships' by Ashley Stanford and 'Aspergers in Love' by Maxine Aston) which I felt were worded much better and made me feel like a person who does care (as they explained or helped me work through many of my confused feelings about relationships) and who is worthy of caring about. I didn't feel that same way while reading Attwood's book... I felt it was too clinical and cold. It may be easier for some, but when you're scared and worried about feelings and relationships, Attwood may not be the book to go running to if you do have a great deal of caring and concern for others. (Regardless of whether you always understand why or what the appropriate feeling is.)

I don't feel that his book "The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome" was aimed at helping Aspies understand themselves or how to cope, it was aimed at enlightening the world of his discoveries about how we act, react, and interact. I do not doubt that the issues in his book are true representations, it just struck a distasteful cord with me as I was just discovering all this "different-ness" that I had not before really considered.

/thread hi-jack, sorry.

Then again, I supported him by not only purchasing, but keeping his book so I must've thought it useful.