Autism, Emotional intelligence, theory of mind and empathy

swbluto · Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2011 11:03 pm Post subject:

[In response to a few who've laughed who might've assumed this post is a joke, the <what I'm going to do> carats indicate what I'm going to do. That's because... this entire post is a work in progress as I can't just sit down and type it all out in one go, as many parts require substantial research.]

So, I want to explore the relationships between autism, "emotional intelligence", "theory of mind", empathy, related personality characteristics and whatever that could be explored that's relevant or somehow connected to this subject.

Emotional Intelligence was a term coined by Daniel Goleman in his seminal book called "Emotional Intelligence: Why it is more important than IQ", and one of the underlying constructs of his book was "empathy", that is the accuracy one had in recognizing emotional states in others and 'mirroring' those emotional states (or feeling those emotional states in yourself; if someone is happy, you recognize their tonal and body-language expressions of happiness, and then you'd tend to feel a state of happiness; if they were angry, you detect their expressions of anger, and then feel angry at least momentarily; If someone was <emotional state>, then you detect of expressions of <emotional state>, and then feel <emotional state> at least momentarily).

Another shade of empathic ability was the ability to imagine someone else's situation and to take into consideration all the emotional states and situational factors into account in "understanding the situation", and then making an 'appropriate response/decision/action' based on that understanding -- how "appropriate the response/decision/action" is will depend on largely how well you'll predict they'll react, which again depends on how well you understand *them* and the situation. There's a few great thread on mirror neurons and empathy that I've seen around here that describe this shade of empathy.

Then, "Emotional Intelligence" was defined as sum of ones underlying empathic ability and situational and conversational responses and behaviors, including acquired skills and learned responses. "Emotional intelligence" also included other relatively important personality dimensions, such as self-control and delayed gratification.

<explore relationship between intrinsic empathic ability and personality traits, such as mean-ness/niceness/insensitivity/etc.>

Now, this is speculation, but a person with a high empathic ability will be able to influence a social situation in any way they might desire, because if they are to intuitively understand another person, then they understand how they will react/respond to certain responses/actions. Niceness/Mean-ness tends to be an independent characteristic from empathy, and depending on whether you're intrinsically nice or mean, how effectively nice or mean you appear to be will depend on the 'nice-ness'/'mean-ness' of your intentions and your ability understand to another person and predict how they'll react. You could also have low empathic ability and unintentionally say/do 'mean things' because you didn't fully understand how your statement/response would affect others, but it'd be relatively hard to 'tend to be nice' if you didn't understand others, as if you had sufficiently low understanding, you'd tend to alienate them and that generally isn't considered 'nice'. So a person with relatively low empathic ability will appear to others as tending towards the mean side of the spectrum, despite the good-ness of their intentions. (In some situations, it might not be entirely considered mean -- you could just be 'weird', and most people will leave it at that and refuse to further learn more about you.) The last sentence, and the paranthesized sentence, probably applies to a large number of aspies.

Now a theory of mind is ... <define theory of mind>. <Relate theory of mind to empathy>...

Now autism includes a theory on <theory of mind>. <Describe the theory of mind in aspergers>. <explore the connection between empathy and the theory of mind in autism/aspergers>. <decide how compatible the empathy and theory of mind theoretical constructs are, and if they're compatible, determine how 'continuous' the empathy/'theory of mind' spectrum is.>

[reserved for future exploration and rambling