Developing an Asberger’s Through Emotional Signally
Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker. 2004. The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans. Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA.
Another important aspect of conversation that needs to be emphasized is the role of emotional gesturing [e.g., how you and your children are signally to each other what you feel, and regulating each other's catastrophic emotions that way so that neither of you blow up] in simultaneously supporting the creative and the logical and reality-based aspects of language. The continuous flow of emotional gestures provides a constant source of new emotions that can stir the next sequence of ideas and works. In this way, a conversation with a good friend is a shared creative enterprise. That’s what makes it so much fun to just hang out and chit-chat. Because some individuals are less comfortable or gifted at expressing a full range of emotional gestures, their conversations often appear more formal and planned. Again this dynamic has been useful in therapuetic work. With children suffering from Asberger’s syndrome, for example, we engage them in pleasurable emotional interactions containing more and more novelty and surprise, gradually accentuated, so that they feel secure while experimenting with new eomtional echanges. As we help a child laugh and giggle, and experience a wider range of emotions from coyness and flirtation to curiousity and mild annoyance and assertiveness, we often observe that their spontaneous verbal exchanges become much more creative and humorous. As they become more creative, they also become more capable of making inferences and engaging in higher-level abstract thinking because these also depend on generating new ideas. The key in this process is a caregiver or clinician who can challenge a child gently and gradually to experiment with a continuous flow of a broader range of emotional signals. We have found that direct work with words and concepts divorced from the world of emotional gesturing does not work nearly as well, and sometimes it’s counterproductive because it leads the child more into scripts than into spontaneous and creative exchanges. [221-222]
Our rational development is dependent upon emotional play at the very earliest ages, and perhaps is a strong determinant of intelligence.
A friend of mine has a boy with autism-realted disfunction. It’s not full-blown Asberger’s syndrome but pretty noticeable. They have been told to provide him with “the rules” for different social encounters.
Problem is, the doctors are completely wrong.
The main problem is that the rules for any social interaction are dependent on how you feel. Most of us have the experience of being “creeped out” by someone and finding some way out of the conversation. Women who survived attempts by Ted Bundy and other serial killers said that while it seemed reasonable to go with him, their emotions went haywire. He creeped them out. The rational rules would have been to have gone with him. The emotional response created the rules for the situation.
AI is beginning to realise this as they develop facial machines that learn to mimic human expressions that it sees. In this way it can actually engage in coregulating emotional gesturing with humans, a phenomenal step towards machine intelligence. It’s still nowhere near the intelligence of a bonobo, though. AI’s original problem was this bizarre belief that rationality was separate from emotionality. We call that “sociopathy”, by the way.
It’s a very complex world.
