Fear versus excitement; why can’t some of us tell?
The social majority of humans, in fact around 60-65% of people, can think predominantly in pictures. They’re visual thinkers. Another 30% of people can think predominantly in words or mental chatter. They’re verbal thinkers. These mechanisms allow people to INTERNALLY mentalise. They can think INSIDE of their heads. And it’s that internal mentalising which allows people to do some wonderful things. It allows them:
- to focus on a goal and simultaneously hold onto a sense of self in order to conceive of their relationship to the goal.
Internal mentalising also allows them:
- to directly contrast the relative intensity and immediacy of experiences and
- to build up and FLEXIBLY DRAW upon stored knowledge
with which one can fathom WHICH of two physiologically similar emotions one is feeling – ie fear versus excitement, or nostalgia versus grief.
But what if you were deaf-blind, or were perceptually deaf-blind because you had both significant visual and verbal agnosias? Sure, you might still have kinesthetic learning (physical learning) intact. You might have a capacity to systematise (mathematical thinking). You might have a capacity to experience patterns and rhythms (musical thinking). But would you still build up this same capacity to internally mentalise as those who have intact receptive visual and verbal channels working?
I grew up face blind, fairly object blind and quite context blind. I know what things are through their placement, textures, movements when handled, their acoustics when tapped. I was quite meaning deaf until late childhood when my receptive language went from only 10% interpretive understanding in real-time information processing around age 9, to around 50% by age 11. And I remember having very little conscious cohesive internal thought. Hence I had to move and do and make tunes and patterns to experience my mental self. I had to mentalise externally. It’s still very hard for me to experience cohesive conscious internal thought. Hence I’m always typing my mind out through my fingers in order to read my thought off the screen for the first time. I also experience my thought through my paintings, my musical compositions, my sculptures. I also became a master at second guessing based on patterns but there are some things which really stump me. Fear versus excitement is one of them.
Those with Anhedonia don’t experience extreme emotion, some are unable to experience emotion at all. But for me, it’s like a majority of experiences are quickly interpreted as fear. And yet the same happened the other way. I was always one to laugh when I had badly injured myself, often laughed when abused and certainly laughed when hit by cars as I did my mad dash across our busy road. So the confusion between fear and excitement, has been a big factor and one which I wonder might be behind two observations among autistic people.
Two of the most common observations of those with autism is that of fearlessness because they giggle or react with excitement in situations they should show fear. Conversely, one of the most common observations is chronic anxiety, often particularly in situations other children might find exciting.
And whilst sensory processing may be confusing or under or oversensitive, perhaps their are other strong cognitive reasons why the bases for telling fear from excitement are missing or poor. And perhaps an understanding of visual and verbal agnosias and their impact on poor internal mentalising and the compensation of external mentalising is both an advantage and disadvantage.
I know many adults on the autistic spectrum crippled by fear and progressively avoidant of potential excitement in their lives which they perceive as threat. Perhaps this knowledge could help explore how to help people to use external mentalising techniques to logically assess situations to ascertain whether they are experiencing fear or misinterpreted excitement. The knowledge that much of their fear is an illusion may empower some people to test that fear instead of being enslaved by it.
Donna Williams
Artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter
author of Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage
and 8 other books.
http://www.donnawilliams.net
I am often told I giggle at things that don’t appear funny, therefor make others around me uncomfortable. My husband has picked that up a lot in the past and probably not until recently understood why I did it.
One occasion I do remember when I was about 10 years old in Primary school and I had climbed to the very top of the monkey bars and lost my balance and fell around 2 metres to the ground face first. As I sat face planted in the ground I didn’t feel the urge to cry as the other children may have. I remember people rushing up to me and I was just laughing away hysterically and then a teacher came along and asked what the matter was. It turned out I had a face full of blood, and my nose was badly broken. Yet I didnt feel it. I dont really experience pain in the same way as other people. (You just have to ask Russell about the birth of William, I laughed all the way through the delivery and i wasnt even on any drugs).
Your final paragraph of the blog also rings true to me. I have a constant fear of things. Anxiety controls my life. It is with me every minute of the day. But I can often confuse myself between a state of fear and a state of excitement. Because when I do go out places, that I might actually enjoy I know before hand I feel so sick to my stomach and I sometimes get so sick I throw up. I convince myself before hand I am not going to have a good time. These people don’t like me. What if this happens. What if it is too noisy? What if someone tries to hug me or kiss me? I overwhelm myself before the time has come. I guess it is that Exposure Anxiety eating at me.
I totally understand this. I had an ‘aura’ of pain when I was a kid but didn’t know if it was internal, external, emotional, physical, was I sad, cold, needed a pee… no idea. In my teens I began to do what is essentially a sensory program to try and experience ranges of sensation and tell physical feelings apart, but my 30s I was really starting to get somewhere but I still struggle to answer questions like ‘how are you’, ‘what are you feeling’, ‘would you like that?’ etc.
As for the hug, handshake thing, I just tell people, sorry I don’t do skin with anyone but my husband. They sometimes handle this really well, sometimes they get curious, so I just tell them, listen, I struggle to process vision and touch together, it gets tumbled and confusing so I just stick with the person I’m used to and relaxed with, thanks. And if they are really annoying I just tell them, listen I spent 13 years before being hugged and then it made my head spin and made me nauseous… so I’m ok with touch now, but only with my husband, thanks. That usually shuts them up and I don’t even have to use the ‘A’ word.
If I am tired, nervous or can’t be bothered humoring ‘mannered’ or pretentious ‘appear’ people, I’ll just ignore the extended hand or I might hold my hands up and shake them and say, there, that’s my hand shake, or display my hands and say, look, no weapons, so let’s skip the handshake thing, ok?
Eccentricity helps of course. But if you need to conform you can always say you’re just copying me 😉
I do tend to shake hands with people who are dying or ancient or if I feel their soul is really dying in there. But I don’t shake hands for the sake of it and after 3 in a row, my body screams that if I shake one more hand it is ready to bite people. So I listen to that. People wouldn’t like to be bitten.
I wonder how much clear distinction there is between these two feelings, fear and excitement. There is “approved” different social reactions to those feelings but are they really very different? My somewhat exciteable daughter, when she was a toddler, loved to be scared by jack in the boxes, scary stories, etc. She laughed and cried simultaneously. I find that the older I get, the less I like to become overexcited even by positive things. It feels much the same as fear to me. And yet I have a very clear mental idea of the difference. It is just that as a woman of age 63 I look back on my life experiences and find that the negative fearful times did not actually feel very much different than the highly exciteable positive things. The positive events were only really enjoyed after the excitement died down. So, was there really something different going on in my body during those two supposedly different kinds of experiences?
Donna,
Are you able to explain through your knowledge the reasoning of repeating an act several times before able to move forward. Example, only able to leave a building through the same exit? Drink from the water fountain 10 times before leaving the building, walk only on paths, never cut through the grass? And if by chance you do attempt to shake someone’s hand, you have to do it several times, and then out of nowhere, you bite the hand you shake. Second question, is it that the autistic person does not feel pain, or is unable to distinguish the emotion that goes with it?
OCD can cause some people to have to repeat patterns until they feel ‘balanced’.
I had this in late childhood.
then when they break away from the OCD repetition, yes, an Exposure Anxiety (avoidance, diversion, retaliation) response could be free to then break through.
good question about sensation
yes, it was hard to know what the sensation was
and second it was then very hard to connect to how to express it emotionally
let alone how do do so socially or communicatively.
but I’m halfway there now.
Hi Donna,
I’m a visual thinker but I also write fiction and poetry. When I’m writing there’s a storm going around in my head because I also have A.D.D. and I keep making errors in the text and spend so much time going back and decoding. The storm is really awful – it’s like a washing-machine and when a clear chapter comes it’s a miraculous event! I was just listening to Beautiful Behavioural Mutation on Youtube; I hadn’t come across a song like that before.
I think ‘mental stutter’ I described above is something I wouldn’t wish on any other creative person – even so I’m very happy with some of my stories. It may be that I did what a visual thinker is ‘supposed to do’ and began studying art. These days I am studying Fine Art (part-time). I still stim but not as much as I used to.
I’m sorry to hear of the death of your friend. Stuart.
The mental tumble may well clear with omega 3s and low salicylate levels
worth a try.
glad you enjoyed the you tube clip of Mutation
did you listen to All Be Happy as well (A Gothic Autism Story)
hoping to get some clips by the new band up soon; Donna and the Aspinauts.
yeah, I’m still feeling a bit floaty about Taz’s death. I just feel odd. Wish he didn’t die that way, didn’t die that young, think of how much he cared about auties and his passion for changing things for them, think about how you can get 100 people doing his job and you’ll be lucky to get one doing it with that realism and heart, think about how some really deranged psychopaths live to be 90 and he got just 37 years, but he did more positive things for people in that 37 years than a psychopath will do in 3 lifetimes and it just feels sad.
sorry, it is just a really sad thing.
I worked with him about 5 times so I’m sure he had friends knew him far better than I,
but he was someone on the ground who was working in a really positive way, with a great positive style….
anyway, I’ll shut up now.
🙂
The part I have extreme trouble with is the accessing anything — knowledge, memory, anything really — on purpose thing. And when I try, I go through all kinds of physical gyrations that can sometimes pull the knowledge out and sometimes can’t but work better than nothing.
Problem is people take all the moving and gesturing as communicating to them, sometimes even telling them things like “go away” or something. But I don’t move to communicate with them, I move to communicate with my own brain.
But even then I have a hard time pulling anything out on purpose. Then it comes out at some completely different time. Makes peopl think I have either a great memory or a terrible one, depending on what context they see me in.
Very interesting post! Thank you!
I love your art 🙂 !
Hi,
I consider myself to be in the majority who can easily distinquish excitement from fear. I had never encountered anyone with this dificulty that I am aware of. I am very interested in hearing and meeting those who do and hear about their perspectives. I do recall over the years of children laughing at funerals, now that I better appreciate as may be examples of confusing fear and excitement. I think that this confusion between fear and excitement may be compensentory for extreme emotions, though they may be drawbacks when emotions go too much the other way.
Debbie