|
|
Postcards From My Mind: Perspectives of Asperger's
Syndrome
Social Skills
People who have a difficulty with the Theory of Mind may display
the following characteristics:
-
Difficulty with Inference: what one should
do when specific directions are not presented. For example,
Jamie’s teacher announces that it is time to go to
the bathroom. Jamie stops what she’s doing and lines
up at the door. Jamie’s teacher proceeds to give her
a time out for not cleaning up before she lined up, even
though Jamie protests that the teacher never said, “Clean
up, then go to the bathroom”.
-
Understanding when one is being deceived:
For example, Eric, the school bully, meets a child in the
lunchroom. Holding a brown paper bag with a heavy object
in it, Eric says to the child, “I have one hundred
chocolate bars in my bag and I’ll trade all of them
to you for your one cup cake.” Your child agrees only
to find rocks in his bag.
-
Perspective taking: The child who makes
blunt comments that might be hurtful may not understand how
his actions affect someone else. For example, James opens
his birthday present, a hand knit sweater made by his grandmother.
James says, “This is ugly and itchy”, not taking
into account his grandmother’s feelings.
-
Literal thinking: For example, when mom
says, “It is raining cats and dogs outside” and
the child is now afraid to go outside for fear he will
be hit by a cat or dog! The Theory of Mind also involves
pretending, thinking, knowing, believing, imaging, dreaming,
guessing, deceiving (Baron-Cohen), forming a “generic
or prototype”
and categorization (Michaels).
-
May appear insensitive to other’s feelings
/ Not displaying empathy: In order to be empathetic
to someone’s feelings, one first must understand that
s/he has feelings! Sympathy, understanding what another would
feel because you have shared the same experience, was always
easy to comprehend. However, I still have difficulty understanding
why a person is feeling what s/he feels when the reaction
is not what I expected. Empathy, being able to surmise what
one is feeling when one hasn’t had a similar experience,
is a foreign concept to me. I have not yet mastered feeling
something that I don’t feel.
-
May have poor cooperative play or turn taking skills:
It’s difficult for me to wait my turn. I think because
when I experience something I feel pleasure and this is fun.
From conversations I’ve had with adults, when they
watch someone who is happy, they themselves feel happy, too.
I just had this experience for the first time a few weeks
ago. I gave Jake, a child I work with, a gyroscope. Jake
was happily stimming on the gyroscope and smiling. I stopped
and watched him play then felt a strange sensation in my
chest, sort of like all my muscles just relaxed and I felt
myself smiling – I was happy for no other reason but
he was happy. This was pretty cool! It’s like borrowing
happiness – kind of felt like cheating off of someone
else’s happiness!
For students who are not at this stage yet, one lesson that
I frequently teach children is to find something of interest
about someone else’s turn. So, when Andy is playing
Candy Land and it’s Charlie’s turn to move (since
Andy will probably not derive pleasure from watching Charlie
experience the joy of his turn), Andy needs to find something
that is interesting such as trying to predict what color
the dice or cards will be. This way the Andy is always “paying
attention” and happy, too.
-
May have trouble monitoring, maintaining, or disengaging
from conversations: In order to keep a conversation
going one needs to constantly take the other person’s
perspective.
-
May appear self-centered or egocentric:
As everyone knows, the person with Asperger’s generally
believes s/he is the center of the universe. It would be
fair to assume that if you didn’t understand that other
people had thoughts, feelings, etc., you, too, would believe
you were the center of the universe. Before I knew about
other’s feelings/perspectives, my opinions/feelings
were the only ones there – so of course I was self-centered
and egocentric!
Previous |
Next
|
