4:37pm July 21, 2015

Omg WTF empathy research sounds like it’s often a sham

This same idiot researcher just said the way we Study empathy in human children is to instruct a family member to act distressed and see what the child does.

TO ACT DISTRESSED.

ACT.

That is not a genuine situation and does not necessarily test empathy in the way people would expect. Someone with really good empathy would not respond to feigned distress as if it was real. And someone who can’t spot feigned emotions but can spot real ones would be up a creek.

I once designed, on the spot, a way to research empathy in autistic children for real. One off the first things I told the researcher was that the tension and stress of the family member had to be genuine. It could not be acted or feigned. Autistic people are notorious among people who actually know us, for frequently seeing past the surface appearance and into the reality in ways many nonautistic people can’t do. I know an autistic woman who flunked an empathy test because she gave the actors real emotions instead of their acted ones. But the idea that anyone can see through surface appearances and essentially stage conventions is unheard of apparently.

Anyway the researcher I know did frustration experiments so she had software designed to stress people out. So you stress out the parent and test the galvanic skin response of the child. Which eliminates the need for any language skills on the part of the child. Add in control groups and everything else and you have a study that will probably show what the researcher had ignored parents saying until I asked her to reflect on it – their autistic children are more sensitive to tension in the air than any other family members.

The researcher had assumed the parents didn’t know what they were talking about because everyone knows autistic kids don’t show empathy. Just like her students thought the autistic kids in Autism Every Day were all nonverbal and did not interact and did not pick up body language and did not make eye contact and show joint attention… Until I took them through the video acne paused it every few seconds to show them how wrong they were. And these are supposedly experts.

Anyway she had better actually do that experiment one day because it would change the entire face off autism research if people started really testing us instead of setting us up to fail. Which is what relying on stage conventions, artificially created situations, language, and multitasking (expecting both reading body language and using language at once), does to us.

FFS I’ve taken one psych class in my life and have no science backgrounds and I can smell the bullishit in research well enough I’ve been publicly praised by actual researchers (including the then president of the Association for Psychological Science). So surely it can’t be that hard to do real science.

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