Opposite autism

January 12, 2005 12:11 AM

Apropos of this thread, I'm curious if there is any sort of 'opposite' to Autism/Asperberger's...

i.e. instead of the child being unable to recognise the difference between a mother smiling and sweetly saying "Come here!" and a mother scowling with an angry expression and hissing "Come here!", is there any clinical term or recognition for a person accutely aware of emotional nuance? I realise that this is only one facet of autism; reading the thread and related links piqued my curiousity.

posted by GriffX to Health & Fitness (15 answers total)

Stab in the dark here, but I thought of the personality disorders such as co-dependency and masochistic disorder. In these, the socialization is abnormally important and helps create the internal condition. Additionally, someone with borderline personality disorder often seeks to manipulate others' emotions for personal satisfaction.

I'll tell you that my nephew and nieces, all with varying degrees of ADHD and remnants of reactive attachment disorder, as well as bipolar (in one) and oppositional defiant disorder (the other), are all highly aware of emotional nuance, even though they often act as if they are tone-deaf to it. It took long experience before I learned that the ODD girl, for instance, was not on the verge of conduct disorder because of a lack of empathy, but uses anger and defiance in highly specific and spectacularly well-timed ways. Imagine a household full of kids who are exceptionally skilled at pushing each other's buttons -- and tragically unable to learn how their own buttons are being pushed ...
posted by dhartung at 12:37 AM on January 12, 2005

Williams Syndrome is a sort of reverse-autism (not exactly, but close enough to be interesting). Williams people are often ultra-social, but can't do any math (or similar reasoning) at all.
posted by Tlogmer at 2:08 AM on January 12, 2005

Sure - politician.
posted by ikkyu2 at 4:06 AM on January 12, 2005 [1 favorite]

Bipolar disorder also has that effect.


Ikkyu2, a politician can't be oversensitive or he/she would curl up in a little ball and die. Trust me on that one. (I have a hubby active in local politics.)
posted by konolia at 4:48 AM on January 12, 2005 [1 favorite]

is there any clinical term or recognition for a person accutely aware of emotional nuance?

I read this and the first terms, even though they're not clinical, that came to my mind are intuition and empathy.

I'm like this, by the way. To me, body language is every bit as real as spoken language. Often I interpret the two as being in conflict, and I often intuit people's true meanings through body language rather than the spoken language. Usually what my intuition tells me is correct.

I'm also bipolar, fwiw.
posted by WolfDaddy at 6:51 AM on January 12, 2005

People with borderline personality disorder are acutely aware of others' moods and emotions--it's something they warn clinicians about. Any other pathology that includes "highly manipulative" would also qualify, I'm sure.
posted by availablelight at 7:09 AM on January 12, 2005

...also, children raised in abusive homes often become hyperalert to shifting moods, skilled at recognizing unspoken emotional needs/demands, etc. See Alice Miller's "The Drama of the Gifted Child," or most anything written about adult children of alcoholics.
posted by availablelight at 7:15 AM on January 12, 2005

I am highly sensitive to and aware of other people's moods, but I have no disorder or syndrome or condition that I know of. I'm just that way, as are lots of people, probably.
posted by josh at 8:17 AM on January 12, 2005

I think there are genuinely emotionally sensitive people--but I also wonder if anyone else here has dealt with someone who was convinced they were unusually or even supernaturally interpersonally sensitive.....but wasn't. I have had a couple aquaintances in the past who just barely stopped short of claiming to be mind-readers, but were almost never right. One man thought he could sense "changes in energy fields" while someone was sitting quietly during a discussion, movie, etc., and would out of the blue grab your arm and say, "is everything alright?" I compared notes with a number of other people who knew him (all of his "targets" for this were much younger women), and his behavior was more of an irritating/inaccurate power play than any kind of reflection of reality.
posted by availablelight at 8:26 AM on January 12, 2005

I'm also sensitive to people's moods. I can tell when what they're saying doesn't agree with their body language. I'm not bipolar or borderline as far as I know (chronic depression is my speciality). However, I am a child, grand-child, sibling, cousin and aunt of addicts of all sorts.
posted by deborah at 10:30 AM on January 12, 2005

To answer 'availablelight's' question in an odd way -

I suppose I am more sensitive than some folks to body language. I have a knack for defusing delicate situations and can tell very quickly when someone is starting to get uncomfortable. I usually detect lying or other prevarication before others do. I think it relates to things others have mentioned (a family history of depression). However, as for the supernatural - I don't think I have any special powers. I'd sooner say that the mind itself is more powerful than it is given credit for being.

However, a professor once had me in his office (I'm a guy) and began to ask me if I had had psychic experiences. He proceeded to tell me that he 'knew' these things and could 'tell' that I had psychic ability. He left it at that, really, and never asked me about it again. He also looked almost exactly like JRR Tolkein...
posted by Slothrop at 11:05 AM on January 12, 2005

Interesting story, Slothrop, and I don't doubt that people like you genuinely exist**. However, there also exists a subset of very annoying people who think they are extra perceptive of other's moods and intents but are simply......not. (For instance, with narcissists, it's very common for them to project any internal feelings or defects onto those around them while claiming that actually it's just that they have "special insight.") I guess if you haven't met someone like that, it's difficult to imagine how infuriating it is.

**BTW, ever thought about a career in law enforcement? The most gifted "reader" and "defuser" I ever met was a well-known detective who specialized in solving "cold cases." To see him interview someone in the course of his work (potential bystanders and aquaintances) was something else.
posted by availablelight at 2:15 PM on January 12, 2005

In response to "availablelight": Yeah, I know some guys who claim they're "psychic" or that they know what other people are REALLY thinking except that it's really just their own anxiety showing through.

Of course, I also know a guy whose girlfriend broke up with him because he betrayed her in a past life 1500 years ago and he's secretly an evil entity that feed's off other's life energies.

Also, the example of grabbing someone's arm and going "Is everything alright?" almost intrinsically confirms itself. No, not everything's alright, somebody just grabbed me and is asking me weird questions! But the instigator can easily just come away from the situation going "Wow, that person was really defensive, there must be something wrong!"
posted by dagnyscott at 2:26 PM on January 12, 2005

lol, yes, that's confirmation bias at it's most annoying.

(And in my experience with that situation, that's exactly what happened: I had been happily sitting at a party listening to conversation until some dodo grabbed me to ask what was wrong. And if you deny that anything is the matter, well, then, you're in....denial. There's no winning with those people!)
posted by availablelight at 2:43 PM on January 12, 2005

Konolia: I agree with you completely, of course.

Some of the divided-intelligence folks posit a discrete intelligence that they call 'social' or 'interpersonal' intelligence. Politicians, team leaders, CEOs and the like have a lot of this; high-functioning autistics, despite being intelligent in other arenas, are often severely impaired with regard to this trait.

I don't think that the opposite of 'severely impaired in direction +X' is always 'severely impaired in direction -X'. Sometimes it's 'very skilled in direction +X'. And politicians - good ones, God love 'em - are very good at the sort of things that autistics are not good at.

Thank goodness we have them, too; otherwise people like me would have to try at it. What a clusterfuck that would be.
posted by ikkyu2 at 8:53 PM on January 13, 2005