Signal Blind

Emotions

I do have emotions, but if you met me you might wonder:

That said, I don’t have all the same emotions and I experience some of the emotions in a different way. Like really different – see Semantic Divergence. The hardware is human animal, but the operating system is logical.

Extra Disclaimer: as a person who can’t experience some of these emotions and experiences other ones in a different way, these descriptions of the NT experience are best effort. I used an LLM to explain them to me but they are largely in my own words as I understand them. Not all NT people will experience them the same way and I might be wrong. I think the descriptions of my own experience are correct as far as I can introspect myself.

As far as I know autistic people experience roughly the same emotions as NT people but they incorporate them in different ways. I am not sure how the experience may vary or how autistic people might describe them.

NT Experience

NT people have emotions deeply integrated into their mind. The output of Social Salience feeds into the emotional part of their brain (the limbic system). It contains detailed information about the vibe of the room – the emotions that people in the room are feeling. The recipient may mirror those emotions: this is called “emotional contagion”. Those emotions then drive the Theory of Mind simulation of other people, providing real-time information about their thoughts and feelings (called “mindreading”). This ability to experience the same emotions as other people is called “affective empathy”. For NT people, emotions and social information are combined and felt at a very deep level. Note that this is all automatic and involuntary – it typically can’t be disabled. This is a key distinction between NT and autistic people.

In addition to social signals, some emotions are driven by physiological factors, the so called primary emotions. Physiological effects feed into other emotions as well: laughing and happiness for example.

People don’t examine their internal state and decide that they are “angry” – they are angry!

My Experience

My experience is completely different. For details, see Semantic Divergence and e.g. Anger and Sadness.

My Social Salience network is silent. Nothing feeds into the limbic system from this area. I don’t have affective Empathy because I can’t share other people’s emotions. The closest I can come is a made up term: Narrative Affective Resonance. If a person’s story or situation matches something in my own experience it may trigger me to feel my own emotions, which may or may not match those of the speaker.

This narrative affective resonance idea might resonate with autistic people.

I don’t pick up any vibes. I have no Theory of Mind – I don’t know what other people are thinking unless they tell me. Yes, I can see laughing and crying and can assume happy/sad, but I won’t know why. I can guess, and if I know a person fairly well I may have a ready-made Logical Model that I could use to predict, but this is a manual process and typically not employed. I am not struggling to model other people’s emotions – I am not modeling their emotions.

So my emotions don’t have the social side and they are not affected by people around me. They are affected by the situation: a funny story will make me smile and be happy. A sad story about somebody’s dog dying will trigger sadness in me as I think about my own dog dying in the future. I do feel the physiological effects: sadness makes me cry and funny things make me laugh. I can blush if I realize I have said something offensive.

These emotions don’t drive me as much as the physiological signals are inputs to my conscious thoughts. That and the content of my thoughts, e.g. contemplating death of a loved pet or thinking about corrupt politicians, will make me feel a certain way. These combine to produce what I experience as an emotion.

I don’t have Alexithymia, but I do have to think to label my emotions. I have to decode my state and map it to a term. I once had to name a state where I was feeling both fear and positive alignment and this was a very strange sensation to me – the only label I could come up with was “high emotional state”. Even decoding that there were two emotions present was quite novel to me. I am not angry, I am thinking angry thoughts. I might be sad (I will feel sad), but it is mostly thinking sad thoughts.

Also note that I have both automatic and logically driven emotions:

  • If I hear a sad story that I resonate with, it will bring tears to my eyes – I can’t control it or suppress it. This is a semantic reflex rather than an affective reflex. Though the triggering conditions may not match up with NT triggers, this is not a performance. I feel it when I feel it.
  • I can also generate feelings like Anger by consciously thinking about things that make me angry (corrupt politicians). I can also stop this emotion by thinking of something else. I return to baseline very quickly and there is no lingering emotion. This is also not performative, but it is perhaps under much more control than is typical for NT people.

Social Emotions (Missing)

The self conscious emotions require a feedback signal for you to understand how the self is perceived by an external observer – you guessed it, provided by Social Salience. I can’t experience any of these emotions:

This one is a stand in for several of the negative emotions:

That isn’t to say I don’t feel things that I would label with those words. For example, I might Regret some action that I did and call that “shame”, but it is a distinctly different feeling from the NT experience. This is a conceptual heteronym – two words that look and sound the same but have different meanings (not the typical use of that vocabulary, but it fits).

Heteronyms

I think I learned a lot of my vocabulary through reading and thus by context. In books when somebody is “ashamed” I can see the inputs (situation) and any description of the outputs (corrective action, future avoidance). I picked up Shame as something like regret, maybe strong Regret. It was compatible enough that I never noticed that my definition was off – in fact it wasn’t until I discovered I was ND that I even became aware of this. In playing with LLMs they picked up on the fact that my descriptions for emotions were inconsistent.

Even before I knew that there was a Semantic Divergence in definition, I think there were problems with using these words incorrectly. I can see that retrospectively where the words I used were taken as judgment but to me they were just descriptive words used in constructive feedback. Now I am more aware that my words are askew.

For example, I might say I Hate somebody, say a corrupt politician. To me this is indicating high magnitude dislike – they are violating my ethical standards for their own gain. I don’t know them, it doesn’t affect me. I just want it to stop. To NT people this means something else: moral disgust, evil, and some feeling of ill will (I think).

Primary Emotions (Biological)

Finally there are some emotions where I think my feeling might be similar to how NT people experience them. The triggers are likely different and any social experience is likely missing, but these are probably close to the NT standard.

These are the primary/biological emotions that are amygdala-driven and physiological:

Internal Well-Being

There are some other physiological emotions regulated by Dopamine (reward/anticipation), serotonin (stability/well-being) that are similarly triggered differently but likely experiences similarly. However, there are social aspects to some of these that are not present.

Note: in NT people oxytocin (bonding/trust) can amplify the social signal. Although it is likely that I produce the hormone, I have nothing to amplify due to lack of Social Salience. This further impedes the social emotions that might improve social harmony.