Hello,
I work with Geoff Bird at London University (London England) and am interested in how people gain insights into their own emotional states and those of others. I am doing research right now into whether it's possible to somehow help people who have difficulties with understanding their emotions.
These difficulties are not a ‘disease’ by the way: they are more like a personality trait, such as introversion. But some people who have too much of this trait do find that it hampers their ability to control their feelings, and it can lead to anxiety and distress.
One person with this told me that for example that they sometimes they felt ‘as though the lights were suddenly going dim’: they no idea what had caused these feelings, but were surely frightened by them. Another person could not recognize anger, in themselves or others, and so could not control their own anger: and that led to problems as well.
This trait lies on a continuous spectrum, and people towards the higher end of the spectrum are described as having ‘alexithymia’, and all that means (in Greek) is that they lack words for describing their emotions. The thing about alexithymia is that it's only recently started to be given the importance which (I think) it deserves.
Alexithymia happens to be very common in people on the autism spectrum, but is by no means confined to autism: people with PTSD often have it, for example.
My own research looks specifically at alexithymia among adults with autism, where I am trying out a program to teach people to improve their insight into their own emotions. This involves a method for teaching emotional self-awareness with the help of a kind of ‘emotion dictionary’ consisting of musical extracts recorded on an MP3 player, together with an on-line ‘emotion diary’ in which to record a person’s daily experiences of emotion.
At the moment, results are looking promising, but I am hampered by not being able to find enough people to make the results statistically valid. So, I'm looking for more adults on the autism spectrum to take part in the research. One of the people with Aspergers who did take part told me about the Wrong Planet website. She said it was a great forum, which she found very helpful. She suggested that I should put a plea for help on the forum, so here I am - and here is the plea.
What is involved? Well, anyone taking part would need to attend two testing sessions at Birkbeck, University of London. I can pay all travel expenses (at least, provided you are travelling just within the UK!) and a moderate payment for your time.
If you would like to help with this research, if you live in Britain and if you have a confirmed diagnosis of autism or Asperger syndrome, please contact me at the email address or telephone number below. The next step is that I would send you a link to an on-line screening questionnaire for you to complete, which will tell me whether or not you have alexithymia and therefore qualify to participate.
If you do qualify, then I would invite you to attend an initial session at Birkbeck, in central London, to do some tests. I would then show you how to use the MP3 player and the emotion diary. You would then go away and, over the course of about a month, fill in the diary. When that is complete, I would ask you to come back to Birkbeck for a final session, when I will do the same tests as before and see if there has been any improvement in your scores.
If you would like to volunteer, or would just like more details about my work, my contact details are:
Tel: 0207 919 7225, email: [email protected].
By the way, I believe in making available the results of my work to the wider public, within limits of copyright laws etc. If you want to read my published (and some unpublished) papers, you are welcome to look at or download them at my Academia.Edu website.
Rory Allen
06 Aug 2012, 11:17 am
