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Comment by kqr

1 year ago

This is called theory of mind and I've been experimenting on my first child as he has grown up and he had it much earlier than research would suggest. (I even tried replicating one of the actual experiments used.)

I suspect there's large individual variation as to when it is acquited. My son is relatively socially competent and intetested in letters and numbers but not yet literate at four.

We'll see how my second child fares -- she is even more socially competent but does not yet speak (first child did her age) so we'll see when it can be done.

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kqr

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john_weak  1 year ago

My mother had stroke like 20 years ago. All of my siblings including myself have had moments of real trouble when we talk to her. She's very functional, but there's a sense that she is not putting herself in our shoes, which comes across as lacking empathy. Even when we try to outwardly express distress, it's like she's blind to it. I just realized recently that stroke survivors can suffer impairment to their Theory of Mind, basically rendering them blind to what others are feeling. That sense can be gone or be impaired. This was such a revelation to me and suddenly everything in the last decade made perfect sense. All this time we thought she was just really self-centered or 'slow'. It caused real frustrations and there were times we even broke down because we expect something that's just not there. We didn't know.

  • supertofu  1 year ago

    My own mother has never had a stroke, but she has very little awareness of her own emotional states. She is an incredibly intelligent person and works in clinical medicine, but she has always come across as harsh and even cruel, because she has never shown much empathy for emotions more complex than simple fear. I think her deficiency in recognizing her own emotional states contributes to her apparent lack of empathy.

    For example, she cannot recognize her own anxiety. She is a pathologically anxious person with OCD, but would never describe herself as so. As such, she has never been able to empathize with the fact that both of her children have anxiety disorders and one had severe childhood OCD.

    It was not a great way to grow up, although that kind of emotional neglect is what made me a more resilient person in the end...

    • unkulunkulu  1 year ago

      I firmly believe now that this is a skillset missing in families/cultures that is totally developable in therapy (recognizing own and as a consequence other people’s emotions).

      This is actually a missing education in my opinion.

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