“It’s like you are just a spectator in this thing”

I’ve just read a lovely article by Sara Ryan and Ulla Räisänen [“It’s like you are just a spectator in this thing”: Experiencing social life the “aspie” way. Emotion, Space and Society, 2008, 1, 135-143] who interviewed people with Asperger’s syndrome to explore their experiences of problems like social exclusion. Some excerpts from the interviews:

“… it just sort of highlighted and made me almost feel as though basically sort of like a freak. You know you really had nothing in common with these people and with people in general and it was a very lonely feeling […] You know, loneliness, I think, sort of becomes the default setting.”

“… like you say something stupid, and then realise you have said something stupid, and say something even more stupid, and or say something or do something awkward and then sort of combination of doing something awkward and saying something awkward and trying to make it funny and then making it even more awkward, making yourself look like a complete and utter idiot and then going all sort of red in the face and then hiding for days.”

This sort of detail of what it feels like to be an aspie in an (in general) non-aspie friendly society is sadly missing from other parts of the psychological literature.

It would have been lovely if they had also included a matched non-Asperger group. For instance after discussing how it felt for one of the participants to try to have a conversation, the authors comment:

“Of course, this is an experience that is probably familiar to many neuro-typical people but the level of intensity and frequency is substantial for people with AS who are unable, or find it difficult to, internalise social norms and values.”

So, how does it feel for a non-autistic person to have a conversation? There must be a tremendous amount of variation! Where do people typically get their ideas from? Where does it feel like they come from? Do they just pop into memory? I have been in many fairly unpleasant social situations where people simply have nothing to say to each other. Wine is then wheeled in before disaster strikes. I have seen a professor practically inhale a copy of the Guardian just before going to lunch; from the conversation that followed it seemed that he was replaying much of what he read, but the result was that people had interesting discussions. To make sense of the autism spectrum experience, the worries of non-autistic folk must also be understood.

I've just read and enjoyed your article on how people with Asperger's
experience life.  A few thoughts came to mind.

Have you done anything similar with a neurotypical comparison
group?  You make an interesting side comment:

"Of course, this is an experience that is probably familiar to many
neuro-typical people but the level of intensity and frequency is
substantial for people with AS who are unable, or find it difficult to,
internalise social norms and values."

So, how does it feel for an NT to have a conversation?  Where do people
typically get their ideas from?  Where does it feel like they come from.
 Do they just pop into memory?  I've been in many fairly unpleasant
social situations where people simply have nothing to say to each other.
 Alcohol tends to lubricate proceedings.  I've seen a professor quickly
digest the contents of an issue of the Guardian just before going to
lunch; from the conversation that followed it seems that he was
replaying much of what he read.

Also how the aspie folk in your sample think of topics, reminded me of
the distinction between stimulus-oriented versus stimulus-independent
thought.  Perhaps this is further evidence that autistics (or those with
ASD, depending on your terminological preferences!) are more stimulus
dependent.  I wonder if results from the cognitive end of the literature
combined with your ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism approach
could give ideas for coping mechanisms, both for autistics and for NTs.
 This would fit in nicely with the idea that "Moral obligations ...
include being sympathetically aware of the kinds of ways in which
others present can become spontaneously and properly involved..." -
maybe conversation partners can help autistics to ignore local stimulus
features.

Autistic superiority

A blog post by Michelle Dawson, in which she lists researchers who publish data on people with autism who are superior to neurotypicals on some task, reminded me of a quote I’d saved from a BBS commentary paper by Gernsbacker, Dawson, and Mottron (2006):

“Quite compellingly, each of these statistically significant demonstrations of autistic superiority is labeled by its authors as a harmful dysfunction. Autistics’ superior block-design performance is labeled “weak central coherence,” symptomatic of dysfunctional “information processing in autism” (Shah & Frith 1993, p. 1351). Autistics’ superior performance on embedded figures tests is considered “consistent with the cognitive-deficit theory proposed by Hermelin and O’Connor (1970) … due to a central deficiency in information processing” (Shah & Frith 1983, p. 618). Autistics’ superior recognition memory performance is attributed to deleteriously “enhanced attention to shallow aspects of perceived materials” (Toichi et al. 2002, p. 1424); their superior sentence comprehension is described as being “less proficient at semantically and syntactically integrating the words of a sentence” (Just et al. 2004, p. 1816); their superior imperviousness to memory distortions is explained by “representations in the semantic network [that] may be associated in an aberrant manner” (Beversdorf et al. 2000, p. 8736); and their superior resistance to misleading prior context is attributed to their perception being “less conceptual” (Ropar & Mitchell 2002, p. 652).”

Gernsbacker, M.A., Dawson, M., and Mottron. L. (2006). Autism: Common, heritable, but not harmful. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 413-414.

Edited to add: hadn’t clicked that the Dawson in the author list is the blog’s author! (She is.)