Perspective-taking is two-sided: Misunderstandings between people with Asperger’s syndrome and their family members
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/1 ... b%3Dpubmed
"Overall, the explanations for misunderstanding provided by participants showed a strong tendency to focus on the limitations of PwAS, with many FMs perceiving an extreme impairment in social understanding. While this is congruent with the characterisation of people with autism as having a lack of self-awareness and a complete inability to understand others (Sarrett, 2011), such beliefs prevent FM from considering the more nuanced aspects of PwAS behaviour. Evidence for this is shown by some of the detailed explanations provided by PwAS, which demonstrate the capability to imagine the subjectivity of others across different contexts, despite FM broadly claiming that this would not be possible. PwAS also showed a greater propensity to reflect on Self as the possible cause of misunderstanding much more than FM (62% vs 40%). Thus, although, PwAS provided less detailed and less frequent explanations of misunderstandings, comparing with findings from other interview data (Capps et al., 1998), they are not as limited as FM assume in their ratings and explanations."
"Here, we are not dealing with whether some approaches to autism and Asperger’s over-emphasise immutable cognitive variables (see McGeer, 2004; Sarrett, 2011), but rather with the way in which these cognitive theories become popular representations, used by PwAS and their FM. These representations loop back into perspective-taking by potentially cutting short peoples’ efforts to serially adjust from their own perspective to more adequately approximate the perspectives of PwAS."
23 Jul 2019, 2:30 pm
