My son doesn't laugh when others laugh - Theory of Mind

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In the video, he was a stranger looking at something on his phone, but no one else looked at the phone or could see what he was laughing at.

I think you might want to be careful about how you think about "theory of mind". While I saw it as useful in the beginning, as I researching more thoroughly, I believe it can be quite harmful as well, because of the assumptions that it is predicated on.

http://www.aaiddjournals.org/doi/pdf/10 ... 2.0.CO%3B2

I get what you are saying. The thing is, I think that it is possible to talk about Theory of Mind issues without it becoming anti-neurodiversity.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Talking about the strengths without the weaknesses is disingenuous. I did not read the footnotes re: what studies autistic people did well on ToM tasks, but I do know anecdotally that my son is delayed in ToM relative to his peers. My skills in this area have improved, but that is the result of hard work, as I needed to understand the motives of people around me. It took a long time, and I am not great at it, but I have more ToM re: NT people than most NT people have for autistic people, for sure. My husband who is probably BAP with ADD/ADHD has horrible ToM.

I do not think that talking about ToM deficits promotes an anti-autistic agenda. I think for some of us, it provides a useful framework to discuss the challenges of living in an NT-driven world.

I read this article and see the author's point of view. I can see how viewing autism at it's core as deficits diminishes or undermines some of the ways we view strengths, learning, and abilities of the person with autism.

At the beginning, I asked:


And I guess partly this is why... as I watched his confused expression, It seemed to me that the rest of us were the ones strangely lacking and missing something.... Why were we laughing when there was absolutely no reason except the others on the video laughing. There was no logic in it I could see, and it appeared strange to me for just a moment. I bring up the theory of mind, not as a way of pointing out his deficit, but as a way for me to understand him, not that he was lacking in theory of mind, but that he was not burdened by being captured by contagious laughter for no logical reason.

This is a whole other thing, though. Saying no is one thing - but being forced to say no over and over and over all day long isn't reasonable to ask any parent or child.

This can be even worse for autistic kids, because if they are perseverating on something they can't have, you as a parent don't have the option of just removing it from their view. DS was once obsessed with the R-rated Batman movie - which he was NOT mature enough to see - but the advertising for it was EVERYWHERE; at McDonalds, on the computer, on the tv, billboards on the street. We spent a week in a near-meltdown state because there was no way he could handle that scary of a movie, but he was constantly reminded of it everywhere we went.

Advertising works in very subliminal ways with NTs from early childhood. I would not be surprised if people's views toward fashion, eating, sport and even politics are actually shaped by the childhood exposure to TV.

It would be interesting from the point of view of "theory of mind" to compare longitudinally how advertising impacts on Aspies and Auties.

I think the difference between the time-share situation and others is that advertisers hedge their bets and use multiple systems to get people to buy their products. Not everything is based on what's "cool" or other social cues: an awful lot of advertisement plays directly into the hands of the aspie-type mind by presenting "facts" that have been skewed to support their product. DS is highly susceptible to the latter, but for instance, does not understand - much like me - the point of sports-related marketing at all (he knows that shoes and clothes cannot make you anything like an athlete.)

That being said, it might be interesting to compare children both on the spectrum and off in the US and in a country like Denmark where it is illegal to advertise to children.

Neither of my kids "catch" a contagious yawn. Neither will usually laugh simply because others are laughing, although my daughter will sometimes take on a very fake sounding (almost creepy) laughter if others are laughing and she doesn't know why. If they understand why someone else is laughing and find it funny, they will laugh very hard, sometimes even harder than other people, and sometimes they will be unable to stop. My son has actually laughed until he started to cry. And not crying in the good way. Crying in the "oh, my...I am out of control and I don't like this" kind of way.

They will both also spontaneously erupt into laughter at odd times, only it really isn't spontaneous. It is because they are replaying it in their head. Sometimes it might be something that they didn't even laugh at originally, but when they replay it, they get it and they laugh.

I don't know that I think it is a theory of mind thing, exactly. To me it seems almost more of a result of over-reliance on literal thinking and processing, as well as being slow to process social information, at least for my kids. I think they start trying to so hard to reason through why it is funny, that it overrides that "natural" inclination to laugh when someone else is laughing. I think this is true because sometimes they will catch each others laughter and I think they really are laughing at nothing. They are just enjoying it. But with each other there is no pressure to "figure anything out." They can just simply "be" with each other.

My autistic daughter does yawn when I yawn. Looks like we need to treat this case by case.

Yes, this laughing when others laugh is a social cognition thing.

NTs have social cognition that causes to automatically imitate others.

Autistic people lacking NT social cognition don't automatically imitate others.

Related to this are some studies in which children had to copy others' movements when others performed an action on moving an object from here to there.

NT children imitated the movements needed to fullfil the purpose like moving the object and the purposeless movements that were put in for them to imitate.

Autistic children only imitated the purposeful movements to reach the goal.

Not true
Helt MS, Eigsti IM, Snyder PJ, & Fein DA (2010). Contagious yawning in autistic and typical development. Child development, 81 (5), 1620-31 PMID: 20840244

According to the article about half of autistic kids have empathetic yawning, only severely autistic kids totally lack the capacity...

Also not true.

My kids are in the mild range, and no empathetic yawning.

i think that "theory of mind" ability allows someone to intuitively understand how another person came to a conclusion. by "conclusion", i do not merely mean an arrival at a set opinion, i also mean an emotional conclusion.

for example, a mental conclusion resulting in the utterance of the phrase "healthy welfare recipients make me so mad" would usually not need further clarification in those with a salubrious "T.O.M" capacity, as they would "intuitively" understand why the utterer uttered the sentence.

in my case, i would just take that utterance at face value and consider it a fact (unless i did not believe the utterer). their reason could very well be that healthy welfare recipients are never at work, and they comprise the bulk of pedestrian traffic that occludes ones progress in the mall on weekdays. who knows? all i would know is the plain fact the person did not like "healthy welfare recipients", not why they did not like them. i also have a very limited amount of curiosity as to "why" someone thinks as they do (which compounds the problem)

an example of an emotional conclusion may be the urge to cry at weddings. the weeping is an end result of some mysterious emotional process that requires no explanation to those who understand that process. those with a non impaired ability to tap into their own "theory of mind".

therefore i do not believe that a lack of "theory of mind" is involved in immunity to infectious behavior.

i think it has something to do with identity connection, and i do not believe that my identity is merge-able (i.e: able to occupy the same space) with any other identity. i am not arrogant or resistant, i simply do not identify with other peoples states of being.

as well as the laughing and yawning immunity, i am also immune to others physical expressions of pain. if someone bangs their finger flat with a hammer, it is only the damage to their finger that will occupy my mind. not their squeals of disapproval.

i do not have any propensity to join clubs or contribute my opinion to any cause. i simply am not swept up in the winds of "comradeship" because i am a sole life. i am very happy to be who i am however. that is partly why i am not interested in joining in with other emotions.

"cliff hanger" situations that are shown in documentaries prior to commercial breaks on TV have no effect on my likelyhood of staying on that channel. i will change channels simply due to the fact that an ad break has come on, and abandon what i was watching in favor of whatever channel has no ad's on, until that channel has an ad break and then it is off to somewhere else.

me and my friend who is named "sonia" were watching an episode of "hot seat" (which is a similar themed show to "who want's to be a millionaire"), and a woman was sitting in the "hot seat" and she had already won $1000 because she was answering the final question that would have paid her $100,000 in winnings if she had answed it correctly .

and the question was "what is the lightest element ?"

a. helium
b. oxygen
c. hydrogen
d. nitrogen.

i said "hydrogen" and changed the channel because i knew i was right, but sonia got cranky.
she wanted to see what the woman answered, and her emotional response to either winning or not winning $100,000. i could not care less about that. it is obvious that hydrogen is the lightest element and since that was the final question, why waste time sticking around ?




my doctor said to my parents when i was a child, that my emotional development would never exceed the emotional development of an average 14.5 year old boy.

Out of curiosity, do you agree?

I'm just looking at myself and noticing something the study may have overlooked or not taken into account. I'm autistic and yawning is contagious for me just like anyone else, but only if I notice. If I'm in my own little world and not paying attention it may as well not have happened so it's not contagious for me. I was a part of similar studies when I was younger and guess where my mind usually was while enduring the boredom?

Did the study prove that yawning was empathy related, or that the study itself was boring them silly?

I don't understand. If one doesn't find something funny and everyone else does why would this one person laugh just because everyone else laughed. I don't follow.