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Autism and no-emotion: What is the Connection?

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Autism and no-emotion: What is the Connection?

There is a longstanding perception that people with autism lack emotion and are unable to grasp feelings. Indeed, many individuals with autism do not express emotion in manners that those who do not have the condition would recognise. However, the assumption that people with autism lack emotion and are unable to perceive feelings are incorrect. Such an attitude can affect our picture of these people and potentially delay effective treatment.


Anger Ignorance

It's convenient to assume that having autism promotes alexithymia, but it's important to realise that one can develop autism without having alexithymia and likewise. Furthermore, while individuals with autism have greater rates of alexithymia, so do those with anorexia nervosa, depression, substance addiction, schizophrenia, and a variety of other mental and neurological diseases.


So, could alexithymia describe why some autistic people struggle with emotions while others do not? Maybe it is alexithymia, rather than autism, that is causing the emotional challenges, and difficulties that people frequently assume occur to everyone with autism.


Individuals with alexithymia might still be concerned about the feelings of others. The inability to detect and comprehend anger may make it challenging to act empathically to rage in particular. However, alexithymic people understand that anger is an undesirable mood and is impacted by others who are in it. However, it's not the same in the case of autism.


Encountering Feelings

Autism is linked to various emotional issues, such as difficulty perceiving the feelings of others. Despite the fact that this attribute is nearly universally considered part of autism, there is insufficient research to back up this assumption.


Recognizing emotions in a face is partly reliant on information from the eyes and mouth. People with autism frequently avoid eye-contact with others, which may add to their trouble managing emotions.

People will be mistaken roughly half the time if they presume that an individual with autism lacks compassion because only 50% of individuals with autism have alexithymia. This notion is incorrect and potentially harmful.


It is not true that people with ASD are emotionless despite the fact that they often excel at solving analytical problems and have various ways of expressing and experiencing their emotions. However, very little is yet understood about the root causes of these problems or the most effective ways to solve them.


Whatever the actual causal link is, it is clear that individuals with autism experience a great deal of emotion in their daily lives.



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