Different children and identity

An LDS person with two children on the autism spectrum asked me both about LDS reactions and about what sorts of things I would be careful about with my young people who are different (kind of, she asked something slightly different but I obtusely missed it and answered that question instead).

My response:

I've actually had mostly good reactions from other LDS people. I once had a relief society president in one of my wards flip out on me about it, but she tearfully apologized for it the next week, giving me a hug. When the book first came out, I read some amazon reviews, etc., and some mormons were a little down on that, said I couldn't really be mormon or had a terrible understanding of mormonism (and I'm sure I didn't understand certain things very well, and my understanding has constantly evolved, but isn't that true of everyone and do we usually judge people because of it?). I have had a couple mormon friends that may not keep in touch with me because of it, or maybe they're just busy and I'm imagining things. Overall the reception within the church has been much better than without the church. To the extent that things got a little ugly here and there (you probably know what I'm talking about), I can sympathize with what people thought they had to do. I think me writing the book put a lot of people in a bad position personally because it came as a surprise and they very naturally perhaps wondered if I am a practiced liar, what did they really know about who I am. They were stuck between feelings that they had to rush in to defend themselves or others or institutions against a perceived threat and the reality that I've always been basically the same person, pre and post book, I'm just much more open now.

If I had advice to give to anyone dealing with children who are different, it would be to try to be very careful to not damage their identity or suggest that they need to be any different than how God created them to be. My current (LDS) therapist says that the best way that we can worship God is to be precisely the being that he created in us. Questions of identity are tricky, of course, because sometimes we associate with attributes that are just coincidentally related to our socialization, experiences, etc. But I think that's all the more reason to be very careful with how we interfere with people's expression of their identities, because we never know what is truly core to who they are.

I'll give you a quick example of what I think to be bad interference. My 5 year old nephew is differently minded. One of the things he does (did) is pull the front part of his hair, particularly when he was thinking analytically (which he loves to do). It drove his mother a little crazy, so she buzzed his hair. I talked to him about it, and he seemed really sad, thought it would take forever for his hair to grow back, and also felt like it was a punishment or because he was bad for pulling his hair. A week later he told his mom, "See, I pull on my lip now like this [demonstrates] because you cut off my hair. And if you cut off my lip, I'll just do this with my ears [plays with ears]." It wasn't accusatory, and it wasn't critical of her. He just realized that there was a reason why he did the things he did, and that they were so important to him that he had already come up with another contingency plan if he lost the ability to do that thing.

My therapist on this topic says that even things that aren't closely associated with identity, like pulling on hair ticks, can still implicate identity in dangerous ways. He says that although things like certain types of anxiety can and should be confronted in people's lives, if you try to get a child to do it at too early of a stage, it will not only affect the anxiety but the child's other aspects of core identity. 

An aspie's view of sociopathy

From an Aspie reader reader:

I found your blog by chance, a week or two ago, and can't help but feel intrigued. I have Asperger's syndrome (or as the next version of the DSM has it, "autism spectrum disorder") and the experiences you describe seem to have as many similarities to as differences from my own. 

We both find it necessary to mask ourselves for daily life because most people, most of the time, don't want to know what we're really like. They want an interface they know how to use, and an impression they can easily categorize. I don't switch masks with the fluidity of a sociopath, nor do I have as large a repertoire to choose from. I'd be willing to bet that I have to put more conscious effort into each one, so once a given mask passes I have greater incentive to stick with it and practice until perfect. (I don't know what you look like without yours, but at times when I can't maintain a mask I've been told that I either don't emote, or that the other (neurotypical) person doesn't know how to interpret my body language.)

Changing contexts, some facets of my personality behind that mask may fold away and others unfold such that people in either seem to form substantially different impressions of me, but I don't make a conscious decision to change what aspects I have on display, nor bother with deception. I simply omit what isn't relevant.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I lack the typical sociopaths' need for stimulation and excitement, nor do any of your examples mention sociopaths with a typical autistics' sensory hypersensitivities. Sitting in a quiet room with dim lights, my experience is finally not *over*stimulating.

In that vein, there's one thing that I really don't understand. What do sociopaths get out of manipulating or otherwise having power over other people? What about it interests you? To my view, people are mostly boring and interacting with them is a nontrivial drain on my resources. (There are rare exceptions to that rule, and I've married one. He describes me as "asocial".) And so I have to ask: Why bother?

I look forward to your answer.

My response:

Thanks for this! I think that sociopaths get a lot of things from power. They get a sense of connection and intimacy with another person. They get a sense of purpose or sense that they are a being in the world that acts, not just gets acted upon. I think for a lot of sociopaths there was some sort of childhood trauma that made them feel like they weren't the masters of their own destiny. Not everyone is bothered by this, but I think for sociopaths it goes too strongly against their megalomania. But these are sort of just guesses. For me I have felt the need for power as a basic need, like the need for love or acceptance must be for most people, but I'm not sure why. Thoughts?

Neurodiversity = all inclusive?

Another supporter from the autism community arguing that neurodiversity should mean exactly what it says:

As a Diagnosed Autistic, and as an individual who displays antisocial traits (Irritability, lack of guilt/remorse, the ability to display a "Shallow Affect".), I find people with AS to be despicably hypocritical as it regards individuals with ASPD. They demand to be understood by "Neurotypicals", and they demand that society not demonize them and make them out to be monsters, and damn it, they demand that people respect that they're "wired differently", but they're willing to throw sociopaths, narcissists, low functioning autistics and other supposedly "Neurodiverse" people under the bus, lest God forbid, some imbecile attribute the asinine stigma they attach to other people to them. Utter cowardice. Here's a radical concept: If you're going to embrace human rights, guys, embrace them for all individuals. Otherwise they cease to be rights and become privileges for the "In Group".

Jordan C. Garrett 

What do you say, autism spectrum? Should we go into this together?!

Perils of certainty

One of the families I grew up with had a younger daughter who was somewhat troubled. She was the youngest and the family had started having troubles by the time the child was about 7 years old, which is shortly after I met them. The girl was really awkward and annoying in sort of a spoiled seeming way. She seemed oblivious to just about anything going on around her and she would do these really bizarre things or throw fits and scream like she was possessed. I hated being around her and I (along with almost everyone else who knew the family) blamed the mother, who seemed to baby her and not set any limits. Recently I spoke with the aunt of this child. The aunt said that the now 20-something-year-old girl is an engineer and is your basic Asperger's type, which to me explained a lot of what I considered unacceptably obtuse and annoying affectations when I was younger. The aunt opined that the child's mother turned out to be wiser than we all knew -- that the mother understood the child was exceptional, which is what prompted the hands-off parenting style. The theory sounded right to me and it was a relatively small thing, but in that moment I experienced a distinct paradigm shift, not just about this family but about parenting and how well we think we understand people and the world around us, compared to how little we actually know. It made me think of this NY Times op ed, "The Dangers of Certainty" (worth reading in its entirety). The article discusses the author's experience of watching The Ascent of Man as a child, and one episode in particular:

For most of the series, Dr. Bronowski’s account of human development was a relentlessly optimistic one. Then, in the 11th episode, called “Knowledge or Certainty,” the mood changed to something more somber. Let me try and recount what has stuck in my memory for all these years.

He began the show with the words, “One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an actual picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the 20th century has been to show that such an aim is unattainable.” For Dr. Bronowski, there was no absolute knowledge and anyone who claims it — whether a scientist, a politician or a religious believer — opens the door to tragedy. All scientific information is imperfect and we have to treat it with humility. Such, for him, was the human condition.
***
There is no God’s eye view, Dr. Bronowski insisted, and the people who claim that there is and that they possess it are not just wrong, they are morally pernicious. Errors are inextricably bound up with pursuit of human knowledge, which requires not just mathematical calculation but insight, interpretation and a personal act of judgment for which we are responsible. 
***
Dr. Bronowski insisted that [physic's] principle of uncertainty was a misnomer, because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we are always uncertain. But this is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty . . . no physical events can ultimately be described with absolute certainty or with “zero tolerance,” as it were. The more we know, the less certain we are.

In the everyday world, we do not just accept a lack of ultimate exactitude with a melancholic shrug, but we constantly employ such inexactitude in our relations with other people. Our relations with others also require a principle of tolerance. We encounter other people across a gray area of negotiation and approximation. Such is the business of listening and the back and forth of conversation and social interaction.

For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call “a play of tolerance,” whether in science, literature, politics or religion. As he eloquently put it, “Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

The relationship between humans and nature and humans and other humans can take place only within a certain play of tolerance. Insisting on certainty, by contrast, leads ineluctably to arrogance and dogma based on ignorance.

At this point, in the final minutes of the show, the scene suddenly shifts to Auschwitz, where many members of Bronowski’s family were murdered. Then this happened. Please stay with it. This short video from the show lasts only four minutes or so.

 


It is, I am sure you agree, an extraordinary and moving moment. Bronowski dips his hand into the muddy water of a pond which contained the remains of his family members and the members of countless other families. All victims of the same hatred: the hatred of the other human being. 
***
When we think we have certainty, when we aspire to the knowledge of the gods, then Auschwitz can happen and can repeat itself. Arguably, it has repeated itself in the genocidal certainties of past decades. . . . We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken. When we forget that, then we forget ourselves and the worst can happen.

Responses to a hypothetical

Ok, we had a good split of responses from the hypothetical. There were 60 total. Approximately 29 people identified as sociopathic. Of those 29, six were diagnosed. Only 16 total people total were diagnosed with anything, including sociopathy. If you're curious to see all the responses, here's a link (there are 9000 total words).

My response to the hypothetical was that if extreme pain was an issue, we should pair up empaths with each other. If it is true that they feel each others' pain and find it painful themselves to inflict pain, then when an empath smashes another empath's fingers smashed with a hammer, that should be a twofer in terms of amount of pain juice. So my main thought was, given that we are in this situation, we should handle the task in the most efficient way possible.

I gave the hypothetical to me extreme empath friend. She suggested that she just wouldn't play. She would spend that time trying to find a way out or just die because she didn't think it was likely that we would be released after the fluid was collected anyway. Interestingly, she has always bucked what most people (including me) would just accept as their lot. For instance, as a child she refused to go to Kindergarten until her father started bribing her with coffee.

Her neurotypical significant other said that he would lock himself up in a room and just hope to avoid anybody, maybe even take a nap because that's how he deals with stress.

Using those three responses and what I predicted would be a fourth, I came up with four categories of responses: (1) cooperative (main goal is figuring a way to get it done, not necessarily to hurt people), (2) opposition (active resistance, (3) avoidance (passive resistance or noncompliance), and (4) sadism (primarily concerned with hurting people). I coded the responses accordingly (see document linked above).

Perhaps people who read this blog won't be surprised, but the large majority of sociopaths chose cooperating. As one person put it, once they heard the rules of the game they became "task-oriented." Why is this? I'm not entirely sure, but when presented with a game like this, sociopaths (high-functioning?) seem less likely to challenge the underlying assumption and more likely to find a way to game the system from the inside. As long as I'm pretty sure the game isn't rigged I'm most likely to play by the rules (and do it better than anyone else by being creative) than to completely subvert them. For instance, in my younger days I would scam people all of the time but didn't tend to outright steal from them.

Cooperative sociopaths were either coldly rationale about getting the job done or were trying to game the inherent weaknesses of the set-up. Interestingly while sociopaths seemed intent on trying to game the system, they were also concerned with the noncompliance of others and how they might try to enforce compliance. They treated the exercise as if it was a game of Diplomacy, tending to advocate for a more regimented and organized approach with due care to isolate the victims and rabblerousers lest their fear, panic, or rebellion spread. (Prompted by a fear of mob mentality? Desire to keep control of the group?)  While the cooperative sociopaths were concerned with emotions and psychological states to the extent they predicted individual behavior, the sociopaths were not concerned with minimizing psychological or emotional scarring, only physical (and they were oddly concerned about that).

In comparison, non-sociopaths who selected cooperation were often concerned about minimizing pain overall, and even emotional pain. Some were worried about minimizing their own pain or maximizing their own chances of survival. Some were primarily concerned with keeping some measure of at least an illusion of control over the situation, or at least being creative with the solutions to the problem.

Interestingly, most of the non-sociopaths answered both questions (how would you feel and what would you do), whereas far fewer sociopaths bothered to answer how they would feel. Even if the sociopath did address how he would feel, it was often in terms of non-emotional reactions, e.g. being impressed, sighing at the bad luck, or just being angry or frustrated.

More interesting still, when asked to imagine the reactions of their "opposites." sociopaths were most likely to focus on their emotions as opposed to what they would do. In contrast, non-sociopaths focused on what the opposites would do, not what they would feel. This suggests that sociopaths tend to see non-sociopaths in terms of their emotional reactions and non-sociopaths see sociopaths in terms of their actions.

Sociopaths also tended to see empath reactions more in terms of group dynamics (e.g., the sociopath would try to predict how they would act as a group), whereas non-sociopaths imagined sociopaths as operating as more of a lone wolf. Again, this is probably true to life -- statistically this situation would have only 1 or 2 sociopaths and the main thrust of the group dynamic would be from non-sociopaths.

I was pleased to see that empaths (at least the ones who visit this site) didn't assume that sociopaths would be uniformly sadistic. Rather, most of them correctly predicted that sociopaths would be rational and efficient (only two sociopaths were coded as sadistic, the other two sadistic responders were BPD and narcissism).

My favorite response about what your opposite might do was from an aspie: "I honestly have little idea."

Thanks for participating!

Sociopath and autistics go together like...

There have been a lot of responses form yesterday's hypothetical and the responses keep coming, so I thought I would continue it another day (not everyone reads this blog every day?) until I post the responses.

In the meantime, here is another audience participation invitation from a journalist looking to investigate, among other things, the sociopathy and autism communities:

I recently graduated from journalism school and am, for now, a freelance journalist. I write mainly about social issues and behavior. Here’s a story of mine from January on sex trafficking.

After hearing an interview with M.E. on NPR, I spent some time reading up on ASPD and digging around Sociopath World. I’d like to write a narrative feature about  ASPD and want to speak with someone who’s been diagnosed with an antisocial disorder, or someone whose family member (or significant other, close friend, etc.) has. I’m in a fairly early stage of reporting, and haven’t yet determined the angle, but I’m most interested (I think) in two issues:

1. The relationship between the ASD and ASPD communities.
2. Innovative and/or progressive methods of treating ASPD. I realize not everyone treats personality disorders, but, obviously, some people do. Treatment could mean medication, therapy, or even personal philosophies for living with/among empaths (and other non-empaths, too, possibly).

Please let me know if you're interested in talking. You can email me at tfjourno@gmail.com. Thanks very much.

An escort's unbiased perspective of the spectrums (part 3)

The Swedish escort's final thoughts:

Understanding social meanings and values (as objective facts) in a situation, and understanding the relevance of social meanings and values (as emotional facts) in a situation, is according to my experience what differentiates aspergers, borderline/bipolar/narcissists and sociopaths, although their actual behavior in many situations might appear similar.

But I have to give them each of them different kinds of communicative feedback, depending on if it is their perceptive understanding of the actual situation/interaction, or their emotional understanding of the relevance of the actual situation/interaction, that is the problem in our interaction.

What they all share in common, is that there is no use in pointing out eventual lapses and mistakes as something like personality characteristics or intrinsic qualities to these persons. It is much better to only focus on the specific behavior, like, “what you just said could be interpreted as mean and humiliating from my point of view”, “this thing that you want or expect is not reasonable within the deal of our date, and it is not anything I deem as enjoyable”.

I do of course have a certain unusual power position as an escort here, since my situation as a sexworker (in my niche regarding level of education and good looks) in the egalitarian welfare states of Scandinavia is one where demand is much greater than supply. And I still have a price level where I can pick and choose among clients, and deny anyone I don’t like, and the clients kind of know that.

So even if some of the people that might be labeled sociopaths in other situations might not care that much about whether an escort girl likes them or not (for its own sake), they usually find my intellect and our oftentimes unique conversations fascinating enough, that they are willing to modify their behavior so I stay with them and they can see me again. (I’m actually like a Scheherazade of sorts, to many of my clients.)

And that interaction with me can then function as something of a learning platform, so they can better modify and be attentive to their behavior in regular life, and so they can better manage relationships with friends, family and co-workers. Because the same mechanisms apply on a date as they do everywhere (the deviant is ultimately excluded as punishment), it is just that it is delayed (people put up with small things over time, and then punish by withdrawal or by getting other people to participate in mobbing of the deviant).

And that mechanism of delay is what kind of makes a trap for otherwise very smart individuals; like that of a boiling frog, they don’t adjust their behavior in good time enough to avoid the social punishment that is heating up for them.

Out on a professional date however, everything is much more simplified, transparent and outspoken, and the feedback is more direct. Because there are no common social ties, there's no use in keeping up facades for potential future pay-offs; there is no common nor competitive agenda reaching further than that of talking, dining and having sex together. The relation is kind of distinctly suspended from normal life and all normal implications, and so the communication is much more clear and direct, which can be very useful and informative for people that have problems with normal relations. It's a sort of platform for training social skills.

I actually keep on getting Merry-Christmas emails from several old-time clients (mostly from aspies though) that now are in functioning relationships, who thank me for teaching them better social skills and better ways to understand women. (Which kind of is funny, as I myself have had a long road to go to improve my own social skills, and partly feel ambiguous about my own gender identity as female in the emotional and psychological sense.)
So obviously my theory and methodological approach do not only help me out as an escort, but do actually help some of my clients to improve their lives.

So I have been thinking that this little theory about perceptive and emotional attention, and what it implies, maybe should be of use to people in more legitimate therapeutic professions. I’ve been thinking that both me and my clients may be getting a better practical understanding of their actual interaction abilities, and what problems they might have than “real” therapists get.
Because I actually do practical activities with my clients (usually dining and sex, and discussing all kinds of subjects), instead of only sitting and talking introspectively with them about themselves. And humans learn better if they “learn by doing” than if they just sit and try to analyze what they have done (there they both miss out other people’s perspectives on them, and might not remember exactly the very things they did not understand already).

An escort's unbiased perspective of the spectrums (part 2)

Thoughts from an escort (cont.):

The positives are that aspies and sociopaths are often less prone to xenophobia, prejudice, home-blind self-righteousness, hatemongering drives and such. For aspies, this is due to their inability to perform the first step of socially appropriate perceptive attention. For sociopaths, this is due to their inability to perform the second step of socially appropriate emotional attention.

And the borderline/bipolar/narcissists are like wild cards that can be extremely tolerant and compassionate in some issues, and extremely intolerant and hatemongering in other issues, depending on how their perceptive and emotional attention randomly work, or from how chaotic and interfering their wound-up emotions are with regard to both their perceptive and emotional attention.

Anyway, an input I have on your blog, based on my theory, is that your focus of inquiry, that of “empathy” could changed to “ability to intuitively trigger and experience socially appropriate emotions in oneself” (the “displaying” part is more relevant for aspies, I believe). Whereas “empathy” merely would be one emotion of many.

Because as I see it, the empathy issue is just what so called empaths kind of react on, from their subjective and practical view (which really is not very empathically done by these so called empaths). But the issue goes much deeper than that, and even though the empathy issue might be the manifested symptom that is most noticeable in human interaction, it is not the root to the problem, nor the cause of the problem, or even what the problem “is about” as such.

As said, I believe that aspies, borderline/bipolar/narcissists and sociopaths all have different causes to their problems, - and yet I find that they often seem to share the same kind of problems in their personal lives.

Their family, co-workers and friends often accuse them of being insensitive, egoistic, uncaring or even emotionally abusive. They often end up with being excluded or discarded by people that have been close to them. (And usually compensate with working hard in their professional lives, thus making money, and striving for power positions – the latter, I believe, not so much because of an actual hunger for power as such, but as a protective strategy for the kind of personal and relational exclusion they fear to experience again.)

As an escort (with certain aspie traits myself) I’ve learned good ways to communicate with these various types of persons. (Although, my selection methods as an escort narrow my clientele down to individuals that are both intellectual and apt at displaying a cooperative attitude to me, or I don’t accept them initially, nor do I accept to go through a full date with them if they aren’t trying to be cooperative).

But approached with the right communication, these persons are not so difficult in regard of being insensitive, egoistic, emotionally abusive and so on. – I just need to verbalize a lot of things and bluntly tell them about my experience of specific things said or done, and how they appear from my point of view, rather than expect them to just know it (as an objective fact) or know the relevance of it (as an emotional fact).

- Again, I would like to say that the distinction in the last sentence is important: Discerning between “objective state of facts” and “emotional facts”, as “knowing something” versus “knowing the relevance” of it.

An escort's unbiased perspective of the spectrums (part 1)

I thought this was an interesting, relatively unbiased perspective from a Swedish female escort comparing her sociopathic, narcissistic, borderline, and autistic clientele:

Plenty of my clients that become regulars, and/or have the tendency to become very personal and go for dates with social time, have 2 traits in common: They earn a lot of money (or else they couldn’t afford me as a steady date) and they have problems with establishing or keeping normal relationships, including sociopaths.

I have a nice little circle of nerdy guys, which could be pretty easily categorized as high functioning aspies (and I believe myself to have some autistic traits as well). But I have come to realize that borderline/bipolar/narcissistic and sociopaths share a lot of the same issues with the aspies, including the issue about cognitive attention in regard of experiencing empathy.
 and I think you have found an important key there, which intersects all of the three categories of people mentioned above.

From my observations, I have made following theory about how two types of attention affect the ability to perform socially appropriate emotional responses:

1) First, external and perceptive attention, which is the ability to a) perceive, b) interpret and c) assess objective “states of facts”, according the socially desired standards of normalcy. It’s about appropriately perceiving, interpreting and assessing the social reality of complex values and meanings in specific situations.

2) Second,internal and emotional attention, which is the ability to intuitively and immediately a) trigger, b) experience and c) display emotional responses, and do so in an appropriate correspondence to the state of facts we objectively perceive.
This is also about to within ourselves experience the “right”, or the socially desirable, emotional responses for the specific situation, in accordance to what is defined as normal by culture and society.

Aspies have trouble with the first, performing external perceptive attention (and to make socially appropriate interpretations and assessments of objective states of facts), which is what hampers their attentive ability to perceive complex social meanings and values in specific situations.
This leads to an incapacity to perform the second ability of emotional attention, regarding triggering, experiencing and displaying the appropriate emotional responses. In other words, since their first perception of “what is going on” often is insufficient or faulty, their emotional responses also goes astray from what is socially considered as appropriate.

While sociopaths manage the first ability of performing external perceptive attention (and make objectively appropriate interpretations and assessments) they have lapses and gaps in the second ability of internal emotional attention, regarding triggering, experiencing and displaying the socially appropriate emotional responses. (Otherwise, I really don't believe that so called sociopaths "lack" emotions, are incapable of love or such, I just think that they have a problem to trigger and experience these emotions in appropriate correspondence to the situations of when it is socially expected of them.) Which I think in turn interacts with how they actually perform the first ability of perceptive attention, as their emotional experiences get uniquely different, and so give them a different pre-understanding for how to continuously perceive, interpret and assess their social reality. This might not show immediately, since they still can make a “good enough” interpretation and assessment of complex social values and meaning, and so pretty much function anyway, if they just learn to act and fake a bit at displaying the “appropriate” emotions, which they did not manage to trigger or experience in themselves.

The borderline/bipolar/narcissistic, I believe, have problems both with having a good external perceptive attention in situations - because their cognitive focus on the outside world gets distracted by their inner emotional turmoil. And they have problems performing internal emotional attention - because their emotions are like a malfunctioning gas-pedal, so they easily under-react or over-react, and so have difficulty appropriately tuning and regulating their emotional responses according to social standards. That is why you find callous narcissists and self-sacrificing martyrs at the same time here, or people that appear pretty much as hypocritical enigmas, like fighting for human rights on one hand (and believing in it) while neglecting their own children on the other hand (and not noticing it). 

This is how I, as an escort, have theorized how these different types of persons seem to largely end up with about the same problems, regarding being alienated and (in the practical sense of social interaction) not being fully emotionally functional.

Because the problematic consequence of not being able to trigger and experience the appropriate emotional responses in accordance with social expectations, is that emotion is what motivates us to think and act intuitively. As I think a social researcher named Arlie Hochschild said “emotion is proto-state both to cognition and action” (although I’m not 100% sure that quite is exactly correct).

But what people most notice, is that empathy seem to be lacking in people with this kind of attentive disabilities. Even though the issue of empathy merely is one symptom (among many) of an underlying cause – which actually is about malfunctioning ability for external perceptive attention and internal emotional attention.

The aspie's charm

I have written before about how people with asperger's seem to be, if not loved, tolerated--at least better than sociopaths or people from some of the other empathy challenged groups. I was thinking about this when I saw a youngster driving around with a "driver in training" sign on the car and a much older person in the passenger seat. The person was going much too slow for the conditions and later was causing a bit of a problematic traffic situation on an unprotected turn. For that sort of poor driving, people might usually honk or aggressively swerve around the slow driver, perhaps emitting a few profanities about getting off the road. But no one did that in this situation. Everyone waited patiently for them to finally find a gap big enough in oncoming traffic to make their turn safely. Why?

And does this same principle (whatever it is) have anything to do with why people don't find aspie's to be as morally offensive as sociopaths?

The similarities in personality disorders

I thought this was an interesting analogy about how vultures who are vultures and storks who look like vultures came to look and act so much alike:

What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is not that New and Old World vultures may not be related but that two possibly unrelated groups of birds have come to look so alike. They differ externally only in the longer and functional hind toe of the Old World vultures and the open nostrils (you can see right through from one side to the other) of the New World vultures.

This similarity is the result of a process called convergent evolution. It’s the selective pressures of the lifestyle that shape an animal, not the shape of an animal that dictates the lifestyle — given sufficient time, that is. So when different animal groups share the same ecological niche independently of one another there is a tendency for them to reinvent the wheel, finding the same solutions to the same challenges and ultimately coming to look very much alike.

Could this explain the similarities between narcissists and sociopaths too? Between borderlines and sociopaths? Could it be that sociopaths actually are on the autism spectrum but just look like vultures (personality disorders) because they've developed to react to different things?

Oxytocin as treatment for autism?

I didn't realize that some parents were already treating their autistic children with oxytocin. The NY Times reports that this practice has been recently supported by the results of a recent study:

[T]he small study, published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the hormone, given as an inhalant, generated increased activity in parts of the brain involved in social connection. This suggests not only that oxytocin can stimulate social brain areas, but also that in children with autism these brain regions are not irrevocably damaged but are plastic enough to be influenced.
***
“What this shows is that the brains of people with autism aren’t incapable of responding in a more typical social way.”

In the new study, conducted by the Yale Child Study Center, 17 children, ages 8 to 16, all with mild autism, got a spray of oxytocin or a placebo (researchers did not know which, and in another session each child received the other substance). The children were placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, an f.M.R.I., and given a well-established test of social-emotional perception: matching emotions to photographs of people’s eyes. They took a similar test involving objects, choosing if photos of fragments of vehicles corresponded to cars, trucks, and so on.

During the “eyes” test, brain areas involved in social functions like empathy and reward — less active in children with autism — showed more activity after taking oxytocin than after placebo. Also, during the “vehicles” tests, oxytocin decreased activity in those brain areas more than the placebo, a result that especially excited some experts.

“If you can decrease their attention to a shape or object so you can get them to pay attention to a social stimulus, that’s a big thing,” said Deborah A. Fein, a psychology professor at the University of Connecticut.

With oxytocin, the children did not do better on the social-emotional test, unlike in some other studies. But experts said that was not surprising, given the difficulty of answering challenging questions while staying still in an f.M.R.I.

“What I would look for is more evidence of looking in the eyes of parents, more attention to what parents are saying, less tendency to lecture parents on their National Geographic collection,” Dr. Fein said.

But before ya'll go running out to buy over the counter oxytocin, beware these warnings:

A study of healthy men found that oxytocin made them more biased against outsiders. And when people with borderline personality disorder took oxytocin, they became more distrustful, possibly because they were already socially hypersensitive.

I wonder what the neurodiversity thinks about the idea of curing autism by making them ore interested in people and less interested in cars, trucks, and National Geographic. Are people objectively more interesting than vehicles and well-respected science/culture magazines? Is that what we mean by autism "disorder"? And if that's true, does that mean that we should all be medicating ourselves, since some people think that we're all somewhere on the autism spectrum? And where is the sweet spot on the spectrum that we should all be trying to achieve?

Speaking of messing with people's brains to achieve random subjective results, this article on recent research suggesting that brains stimulated in a particular way appreciate art more (at least representational art).

Thin line between Aspie and sociopath?

A lot of people who write me show signs of both, maybe not quite fitting either. For instance:

Thanks so much for your fabulous book, which has really helped me to understand myself. I know (partly because you specifically say so in the book) that many of your readers say this, but I see so much of you in me and me in you.

I've always known that I'm different, given my inability and disinclination to form deep emotional bonds and to make personal sacrifices for the sake of morality. I once thought that I might be have Aspergers Syndrome, as it's a common condition among geeks like me, but there are some characteristics of Aspies that I can't relate to at all, most notably their tendency to feel genuine remorse when they finally realise that they've hurt someone.

Until recently I didn't believe that I could be a sociopath because I was prone to worry and upset, and because I thought that I was terrible at playing the game. However, since being medicated for anxiety and depression I've become much less susceptible to distress, and your book has helped me to understand why I don't always win (as I previously assumed that sociopaths do) when playing the game - like you I crave stimulation, this unfortunately means that I have a tendency to throw away the game in favour of the momentary thrill of riling someone up.

Also like you, I struggle to react appropriately to other people's confusing social cues (the main reason I thought I was an Aspie), and must train myself to behave with "sensitivity". Although I'm almost your age I'm not as far along as you in that regard, but I'm making progress (I think about half the people I meet today find me charming, as opposed to about 10% when I was in high school), and your success gives me hope that I'll eventually develop into a convincing wolf in sheep's clothing, able to form long lasting relationships (like you, I'm not completely immune to loneliness) and to keep a job for more than a couple of years. However, I have no desire to become an empath, even if that were possible - over the last few years a series of setbacks destroyed my supreme confidence, feeling like I was just like everyone else was so horrible that I went to my doctor to get doped up.

I know that some people think that my life - directionless, meaningless, and solitary (like the fictional vampire you mention, I didn't seek out a lonely existence but I live one to the fullest) - must be terribly sad. I don't give a damn, in fact, one of the things that I really like about going to restaurants, movies, etc., alone is that it's defiant. I just love making others uncomfortable, watching them squirm as they decide whether to confront my violations of social norms - I feel empowered doing it, even though I know that, in the long run, making enemies erodes my power base. I'm not as big a risk taker as you though, my taunting of others is usually limited to staring at people (like you I have a predator stare, I used to think that my unusual eye contact habits meant I was an Aspie, but I can make normal eye contact, I just choose not to) and flaunting my high carbon footprint lifestyle (environmentalists are my favourite targets, partly because their ridiculous irrationality and hypocrisy invites it, partly because, like you, I find it infuriating when someone tries for force me to experience guilt or shame).

On the subject of the hypocrisy of empaths, I found your discussion of East of Eden's Cathy (whose insight into the frailties of others leads her to conclude that people are gross hypocrites and wholly unworthy of her respect) absolutely fascinating. Unlike you, I've never had anyone teach me that empaths are "just like me" (I've never had any close relationships - my megomanical father and highly anxious mother were always cold to me, my relationship with my brother is very competitive, and I've never bothered to build close friendships or long lasting romantic relationships), all I see when I interact with other human beings is hypocrisy - they judge me for being inconsiderate, yet they don't consider my needs when push comes to shove (during my depressive episode most of my "friends" avoided me and my boss and colleagues pushed me out of my job). I haven't read East of Eden but I'm going to, I've been making an effort to read more fiction since I heard that Aspies are told to read fiction to learn (the very useful skill) cognitive empathy.

Anyway, you may or may not hear from me again - I've become an avid follower of your blog but I'm a lurker, like you I think that we learn much more when we just listen (or read, as the case may be). I think that you've achieved your goal of creating a community of like-minded individuals who have a lot to learn from one another - thanks again.

Sincerely (or as sincerely as a likely sociopath can write),
C.

I have a personal interest in solving the mystery. A lot of my relatives seem to have one foot in both aspie and sociopath camp. Does anyone else fall along this border?

Failure to conform to social norms

One of the primary characteristics of a sociopath is a failure to conform to social norms. Interestingly, this appears to be linked to a particular part of the brain and such that activity in that segment predicts whether and how someone will conform to social norms. From Science Daily:

"We discovered that the decision to follow the fairness norm, whether voluntarily or under threat of sanctions, can be directly influenced by neural stimulation in the prefrontal cortex."

Researchers asked the participants to participate in a classic sharing game:

"[T]hey received money and were asked to decide how much of it they wanted to share with an anonymous partner. A prevalent fairness norm in Western cultures dictates that the money should be evenly split between the two players. However, this contrasts with the participants’ self-interest to keep as much money as possible for themselves. In another experiment, the participants were faced with the same decision, but knew in advance that they could be punished by the partner for an unfair proposal."

Stimulating the right prefrontal cortex changed people's willingness to conform to social norms, but in odd, and seemingly contradictory ways depending on whether there was a threat of punishment:

When neural activity in this part of the brain was increased via stimulation, the participants’ followed the fairness norm more strongly when sanctions were threatened, but their voluntary norm compliance in the absence of possible punishments decreased. Conversely, when the scientists decreased neural activity, participants followed the fairness norm more strongly on a voluntary basis, but complied less with the norm when sanctions were threatened. 

But is that because people's perception of the fairness of the game shifts as well? In short, no:

Moreover, neural stimulation influenced the participants’ behavior, but it did not affect their perception of the fairness norm. It also did not alter their expectations about whether and how much they would be punished for violating the norm.

What does this suggest? Researchers concluded that it is quite possible to know something is wrong, but be more or less likely to conform your behavior to that knowledge based on brain activity:

We found that the brain mechanism responsible for compliance with social norms is separate from the processes that represent one’s knowledge and beliefs about the social norm," says Ernst Fehr, Chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. "This could have important implications for the legal system as the ability to distinguish between right and wrong may not be sufficient for the ability to comply with social norms." Christian Ruff adds: "Our findings show that a socially and evolutionarily important aspect of human behavior depends on a specific neural mechanism that can be both up- and down-regulated with brain stimulation."

This was a particularly interesting finding to me because sometimes I have felt like the reason I do wrong things is not because I don't know that they are wrong, but that I don't recognize in that moment that they are or I don't care about the particular consequences, i.e. no threat of punishment. I feel like I respond really well to incentives. If there is a very clear consequence I actually care about (e.g. the certainty of a dismemberment or the possibility of something good), my behavior will naturally maximize that incentive structure. It makes me wonder, if there are people like me who respond best to material consequences (high activity in this part of the brain?), are there people who respond best to just the thought of fairness and being a good person (low activity in this part of the brain?). Either way, I really like the point made at the end about the legal definitions of insanity not just for psychopaths, but for other disorders characterized by a failure to conform to social norms like Asperger's and others on the autism spectrum.

Sociopaths feel empathy (sort of)

Recent research suggests that sociopaths can feel empathy (or at least their mirror neurons light up as if they are feeling empathy) when directed to put themselves in the shoes of someone else. From the BBC News:

Psychopaths do not lack empathy, rather they can switch it on at will, according to new research. Placed in a brain scanner, psychopathic criminals watched videos of one person hurting another and were asked to empathise with the individual in pain. Only when asked to imagine how the pain receiver felt did the area of the brain related to pain light up. Scientists, reporting in Brain, say their research explains how psychopaths can be both callous and charming. The team proposes that with the right training, it could be possible to help psychopaths activate their 'empathy switch', which could bring them a step closer to rehabilitation. Criminals with psychopathy characteristically show a reduced ability to empathise with others, including their victims. Evidence suggests they are also more likely to reoffend upon release than criminals without the psychiatric condition.

I always wonder at this logical jump -- that a lack of empathy is the primary reason why sociopaths reoffend as opposed to, say, fearlessness, overoptimism, etc.? Maybe, but I haven't seen actual research on the issue, only idle speculation. The LA Times reporter, Geoffrey Mohan, takes this flawed line of reasoning one step further and suggests that only automatic empathy will do the trick:

But there is a substantial gulf between automatic empathic responses and those that result from cognitive control. Because a psychopath likely cannot be "trained" to summon up empathy to counterbalance manipulative and violent behavior, therapies would have to focus on embedding the process where it belongs: in the largely unconscious emotional regulating centers of the brain.

I disagree. I think sociopaths can be trained. I think that is the biggest implication of this recent research. And I think other research has shown that conscientiousness is the trait most strongly correlated with successful sociopaths vs. unsuccessful sociopaths. And what is conscientiousness but the acquisition of good habits, i.e. training. Plus, my own experience suggests that sociopaths can be trained. Readers of the book will recognize Ann as my trainer. So, it's an odd assertion to make, that sociopaths can't be trained. But luckily the researchers seem to share my view:

"From a therapeutical point of view, the big implication of our study is it does not seem to be the case that they have broken empathy per se,” Keysers said. “That would suggest that what therapies need to do is not so much try to create empathy in them, but try to make empathy more automatic and potentially do so by making the social cues of others more salient, so they will always be drawn into this empathy mode that they can activate when they want to.”

Especially given what we know of cognitive empathy being something we can practice.

So do I think that this is major news and will change the way we view sociopaths? Maybe it will change the common (mis)conceptions regarding sociopathy, but it is completely in line with recent trends in sociopathy research. For instance, Joseph Newman has a similar theory that sociopathy is largely an attentional issue, and that when you direct their attention to emotions (apparently even to the emotions of others), they experience them in relatively "normal" ways. The researchers of this current study agree:

Theories of psychopathy’s origins center around deficits in instrumental learning and attention. Keyser’s conclusions merge with those hypotheses. Of particular note were scans that showed abnormal activation in the amygdala, an area of the paralimbic system associated with emotional learning. Psychopaths may lack clues to the salience of social stimuli, an attribute shared to a certain degree with autism spectrum disorder. 

[I have often wondered if sociopathy is an autism spectrum disorder]

Psychopaths therefore may not be able to develop more complex structures of rules and morals, said Keysers.

“They don’t have this tendency that we normally have to be drawn into what the other person is feeling, and you can rephrase that as an attentional deficit,” Keysers said. “They simply don’t attend to what is going on with other people, automatically.”

So no, I don't think this is so different from what has been the recent trend in how researchers have viewed sociopathic empathy, particularly when you consider that sociopaths have always been acknowledged to have cognitive empathy, just not emotive empathy. Research suggests that cognitive empathy can be enhanced by attention directing exercises such as perspective taking. I have consistently said that sociopaths are able to put themselves into the shoes of another and imagine what it might be like to be that person, which possibly explains why we're so good at manipulation. Also, I have even experienced this type of focused empathy accidentally.

Things I would like to see explored further:

• Is this sort of empathy different from mentalizing?
• Can anyone empathize with things they haven't yet experienced or the experiences of others that are dissimilar to them (e.g. white people don't empathize with Trayvon Martin as much as African Americans do)?
• What is the relationship between this attentional empathy and being moved (manipulated into feeling your own feelings in response to stimulus?)

So this is good news for sociopaths and our fight against the stigma, but knowing how much some people blindly hate sociopaths, my guess is that this is eventually going to be used to argue that sociopaths are just being lazy or opportunistic when they choose not to empathize.

As a side note,  apparently in the Netherlands psychopaths have access to the insanity defense? "Keysers and his team were given access to offenders who committed violent crimes, such as rape and murder, but who were found not responsible due to a psychopathy diagnosis." Sort of not surprising for the Dutch.