Welcome back to Reading the Research! I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects to share with you. Along the way I discuss the findings with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today’s article suggests something interesting about how understanding feelings works. In turn, that suggestion might clarify something about how autistic people process emotions, and why we so often seem to have alexithymia. (Alexithymia is the word that describes when people have trouble identifying and describing emotions.)
Graphing Emotions
As mentioned last week, the latest research shows you can graph all emotions on an X and Y axis chart. If you’ll forgive a hastily drawn MS Paint drawing…
Emotions can be graphed on this chart fairly simply. The energy of the emotion is in the calm-wound up axis. If you’re calm but the feeling is unpleasant, appropriate words might be sad, depressed, or tired. If you’re wound up/high energy and the feeling is pleasant, you might feel excited or joyful.
The thing that always surprises me about this concept is that the measurement on the pleasant-unpleasant scale is entirely subjective. For example, anxiety and excitement are literally the same “wound up” / high energy feeling. The only question is how you personally feel about the situation causing that emotion. If it’s a good thing, then it’s excitement. If it’s a bad thing (or you’re prone to pessimism or anxiety in general), you’ll read it as anxiety. Make sense?
The Study
Moving on to the actual research… the team of researchers had (presumably neurotypical) people listen to a collection of nonverbal people sounds expressing various good and bad emotions. They then had to identify the emotion based on the sound. They did fairly well recognizing the moderate to higher range of emotions. But beyond a certain point, people could only recognize the intensity of the emotion and how energetic it was. And below moderate, the same was often true.
Now, this study was about perceiving emotions via hearing. But something the mentioned here seemed right on point. Natalie Holz, the lead author, said, “At peak intensity, the most vital job might be to detect big events and to assess relevance. A more fine-grained evaluation of affective meaning [the emotion] may be secondary.” Translated: it might be more important to recognize intense emotions exist and decide whether you need to care about them, than to figure out exactly what’s being expressed.
Internal Experience
While she may have been talking about the experience of processing a loud shout or scream, the idea seemed about right in describing how I process emotions internally as well. The stronger an emotion is, the harder it is for me to put a name to it. I might easily describe small irritations, like the ducks pecking on my sliding door, as “slightly annoying.” But large things, like the positive emotions I felt on my wedding day, or negative ones arising from regular friction points with my spouse, defy categorization. It’s about all I can do to pin them down to a quadrant and recognize that they’re intense emotions.
It really becomes less an issue of which emotion I’m experiencing, and more “what do I need to do to survive this situation?” The exact emotion is irrelevant, because I need to make sure I don’t say or do something I’ll regret later. I have the most experience with negative emotions. But even positive ones can sometimes end with your metaphorical foot in your mouth.
It’s known that autistic people often have trouble understanding our feelings and those of others. The Intense World theory suggests that autistic people may feel things more strongly than typically-developing people. Given the overlap of alexithymia and autism (as high as 85%), it might be reasonable to suppose my experience is fairly common.
How about you? Are you also overwhelmed when you experience very strong emotions, or are you always able to name what you’re feeling?
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter! There are links and comments on studies that were interesting, but didn’t get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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