Autism, Alexithymia and utlitarian moral judgements

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Study - Divergent roles of autistic and alexithymic traits in utilitarian moral judgments in adults with autism

We May Have Been Wrong About Autism And Empathy - Huffington Post article about study

Another case where the autistics might have known more about autism then the experts.

That first link was way over my head. I'll have to read that a few times. I kept getting lost and having to re-read.

The second link was a nice summary of the findings. Yay for boiling it down.

I did not realize that there was such a stigma on Autistic people when dealing with morals. I look at myself and I am very moral. Couple that with the built in rigidity and it would seem that morality would just be reinforced. And, I have been finding out that there are a lot of misconceptions about the empathy thing.

I can;t stand to see things get hurt or suffer. But, I can't understand the emotional states of people on the fly.

And, I definitely have alexithymia. I used to wonder why my therapists (many over many years) would constantly pound me with, "But, how do you feel?" I'm not talking about spread out. I mean many, many times in one session, usually in a row. Apparently the way I was expressing what I thought was how I 'felt' was not something they were looking for.

Add that to the fact that as I discovered all the stupid things that I do or have done, are really not so stupid after all. How? I found other people's words for the first time that I could say, "Yes!! That's it exactly!!" And, that's been driving that point home over the last few months.

Getting to the OP's statement....I think that they are just figuring out how to see how we see things. I would agree that we know ourselves better than they do. But, it seems to be prevalent and I think it's because we are just really learning to understand and communicate better between each other.

Regarding alexithymia - I wonder if it might not be an inherent part of autism, but rather a response to the environment. NT kids learn how to label and describe their emotions by having parents who can correctly guess how they're feeling and give them the words to describe it (eg telling a tantrumming toddler 'I know, it's so frustrating when mommy doesn't want to buy the toy you want'). Autistic kids often feel different emotions in a given situation than NT kids would feel (eg fear and distress at their birthday party because it's overloading and disrupts routine), and often express emotions differently in body language, so it may be harder for an NT parent to read them and correctly map their experience to words. Meanwhile, an autistic parent who has alexithymia would also struggle with this, because any parent with alexithymia would struggle with this. An autistic parent without alexithymia should do fine at mapping an autistic child's emotions.

This is just a theory, so far, but it would be interesting to study. I wonder if training parents of newly diagnosed autistic toddlers to understand their child's emotions and verbally map them would reduce the rate of alexithymia in their kids? And among autistic kids with autistic parents, is alexithymia correlated between parent and child? And is that correlation affected by adoption? (I doubt I could find a large sample of autistic adoptive parents of autistic kids, especially since I'd need to restrict it to kids adopted as infants. But I might be able to find a sample of autistic adoptees with autistic biological parents who didn't raise them.)

First article was too hard for me to digest while surfing the net and pretending to work. Second was much better.

Yeah this matches my observations. I have 2 autistic offspring (HFA). Son has no concern toward me at all, daughter brings joy to my life and is very empathic. Lack of empathy is not, in my opinion, a core trait of autism.

Interesting,I've always explained my Alexithymia as my emotional responses going through he logical part of my brain.I can usually tell people's emotions intellectually and explain to them what they are feeling and sometimes why. Though I tend to have no clue what caused it emotionally or sometimes at all. I've always viewed others scientifically and judge emotions by the clinical symptom rather than the emotional feeling itself.Needless to say I keep accidentally insulting people.

Oh wow! Thank you so much for sharing this! The first article was perfect! I found it to be very interesting (however, it did contain some grammatical errors.... it bugged me a teeny bit..)
I loved this part:
****
can distinguish between intentional good and bad actions and have preserved moral knowledge
****
Yes- finally!! !! ! Someone said what everyone knew!

"there is a paucity of literature exploring how empathy deficits in ASD translate into behavioural choices in hypothetical scenarios."

Again, this could be ameliorated by- GASP- asking autistic people what they would do Not. that. hard.
Really, this isn't rocket science my goodness... but I get it, scientific method and all that jazz... Results, publications yada yada.

The second one was nice. The facebook comments were annoying as s**t!

However, I really was blown away by the further implications in the first article about the effect of Alexithymia and empathy. It is starting to make more sense to me now.
I think I may be Alexithymic or something, but I still feel like I don't quite understand it. It kind of confuses me like it makes sense, but I feel like I understand my emotions quite well- after I sit and think about them for a very very very long time and have properly dissected them. I'm still confused by the idea of Alexithymia, but then I have prospagnosia and was also confused by the idea of that, but also by using someone's face as the primary means of recognizing someone instantly haha! I spend a good part of my time being confused basically and learning new things about this kind of stuff.

@Ettina.
That's a very interesting hypothesis, and it's consistent with my own experience of Alexithymia.

Something that has highlighted this for me recently is when I've been working with my counsellor. She often identifies my emotional responses long before I do. The physical effects of the emotion are present - for example, when anxious, my breathing and heart rate go up, posture becomes more rigid, actions more jittery etc. But it's often not until she points out her observations that I actually realise that I'm anxious (or whatever). I just don't seem to have any instinctive or learned response that links the physical reactions to the emotion. In order to work it out, I need to consciously process the "symptoms", have it pointed out to me, or see/hear/read an example of someone else feeling the same emotion.

The fact that I can't identify my own emotions, even when sometimes another person can see them perfectly clearly, does make me wonder whether I have missed out on some kind of "training" that would have allowed me to connect the sensations with the emotions.

"We May Have Been Wrong About Autism And Empathy"

What do you mean "we," kemosabe?

"Another case where the autistics might have known more about autism then the experts."

There must be some autism researchers who are themselves autistic, yes? I don't follow the technical literature in the field, but if anyone knows names I'd be interested to look them up. (People like Temple Grandin and others obviously have written about their own experiences, but they aren't psychology or neuroscience researchers per se, and don't publish research papers like the one in the OP.)