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Comment by piazz | Hacker News Reader

The bits of the transcript about having to wear a mask in order to function, having to internalize algorithms of human behavior that are totally unintuitive, and realizing that one’s deepest interpersonal instincts are out of sync with the rest of your kin remind me strongly of some individuals I’ve known with Aspergers/severe ADHD.

Additionally, her descriptions of not feeling fear, processing emotions at a lower intensity level than others, needing constant stimulation, and having a cognitive, but not truly emotional, understanding of romantic love and empathy ring true to my experience knowing these people.

I wonder if there is a legitimate grey zone at which these disorders overlap.

Or, alternatively, maybe my friend is just a psychopath.

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Most people on the autism spectrum can experience the whole gamut of human emotion. There were some studies done just recently that concluded we feel compassion just like everybody else. (Certainly comports with my personal anecdata.) What we lack is the ability to express our feelings in a manner that registers as legitimate to neurotypicals. (Some of us lack the ability to quickly read emotions in others, others don't.) There is far more diversity among autistic brains than among neurotypical brains, which means from an autistic perspective all NTs are kinda the same. And this pattern or template, for how an NT behaves, if you deviate too far from that, the lizard brain "uncanny valley" instinct kicks in. The feeling of "this thing is imitating one of my kind, perhaps to eat me".

The bitter irony is, psychopaths are far more dangerous and yet they make better imitators, and can avoid triggering the uncanny valley instinct. That's why they can be so charismatic and attract followers.

Yeah, the uncanny valley effect is very damaging to people with invisible disabilities or psychological differences. If you look normal but don't 'act' in a way that's expected, it seems to creep out a lot of people.

And unfortunately, I believe this may be why to some degree, having the difference being physical/visible may make someone with a disability more sympathetic/liked. Disability itself has an uncanny valley setup ranging from 'can pass as completely normal' (certain high functioning psychopaths)to 'is visibly different and accepted'.

I also wonder if fiction may have had an effect here too. The average fictional psychopath/sociopath/whatever may look more like someone on the autistic spectrum than a genuine psychopath or sociopath.

In DSM-V (2013), asperger's is no longer being diagnosed. It is ASD ("autism") or not, and ASD is a spectrum. ADHD might very well be related to ASD (there's talks to merge the two, though I don't have an online source). People with such diagnosis are (neuro-)atypical. Someone with ASD likely has hyperfocus on certain subjects, and is oversensitive and undersensitive to certain stimulus (certain because it differs per autist). A psychopath can find common ground with an autist on the undersensitive aspects, insofar that they could be friends or that the psychopath only needs to wear the mask on (certain) oversensitive aspects. A psychopath might also very much enjoy the hyperfocus of an autist.

Disclosure: I have ASD diagnosis.

I have these problems. I've learned to "act normal" through decades of interactions with those around me. I have a wife and kids and a normal job. My oldest daughter acts just like me and I am actively teaching her how to "act normal". It isn't a big deal.

It's like talent in art or sports, some people are intuitively good at it, ie have a knack for it, others need to work at it.

People with asperger do have emotions including fear - one of symptoms is inability to control them (it somethimes manifests through blow ups and sort of temper tamtrum when things don't go the way autistic likes or needs, when routine is broken etc). In particular, people with asperger can be very fearful.

They do not express them the same way, they may lack awarness of them (another symptom), they don't understand them and they occure in different situations then the ones that would make neurotypical angry etc. But, they do feel and are not machines.

Simon Baron-Cohen's book Zero Degrees of Empathy explores this very idea. Might be worth a read if you're curious.

He's wrong though. Alexithymia is more common in autistic people, but it's neither suffient nor required for an ASD diagnosis.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-autis...

This linking of alexithymia to autism has caused harm by making it harder to get the diagnosis for people who can recognise emotion within themselves and others.

We need better constructs for this. Alexithymia is typically defined entirely in terms of whether someone can identify emotions, regardless of the underlying failure mode. In particular, some clinicians seem to think that everyone has the same baseline interoceptive experience and that any problem with identifying emotions is therefore purely a problem of attention or vocabulary.

I did not realize. Thanks for the correction.

Looks fascinating - I’ve added it to the list. Thanks for the recommendation.

It's possible to be diagnosed with aspergers traits rather than aspergers, and I think I heard it was possible to have psychopathic traits without being a 'full' psychopath as well. So it definitely seems possible there could be an overlap in some cases.

You could also literally have both at once, since these conditions/states/differences/whatever aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

That’s not right.

Aspergers is not associated with “not feeling fear.”

If you’re just assuming this from your experiences with these individuals, you’re just assuming this, and might do well to expand your considerations of what different people find fearful.

I’m sure you would find many of them fear people who jump to conclusions before thinking through the various possibilities; or the outcomes of hasty judgements.

And, I recommend you read about it.

It’s a direct observation I made from being in a relationship with an individual diagnosed with severe ADHD for ~2 years. It’s not a superficial observation extrapolated from a few encounters. I’m not drawing the conclusion that individuals with ASD feel no fear, either.

I was constantly struck by how she didn’t seem to fear any sort of physical risk. It may well be the stimulus/risk seeking nature of ADHD, or just her personality - I’m honestly not sure.

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