You see this used even as diagnostic criteria yet when people attribute malice to their computer or car its considered normal. To me this is just normal anthropomorphization and the confusion regarding emotions in autism. I honestly am convinced there is nothing but communication going wrong here
Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
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Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
#92I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. Anyway I always had a pet theory that the reason some people are fooled into thinking LLM text output is a real human with feelings, and some aren't, comes down to this difference in brains. (Personally I never feel like the LLM is a real human and I'm kind of autistic too.)
The normal version is anthropomorphizing - projecting humanity onto something (state of mind, emotions, reactions).
The autistic version is interpreting the state of objects emotionally, which is closer to synesthesia.
The normal version is practice for interacting with people, the autistic version is consuming emotional attention that could otherwise be used for people.
Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
On basis of spending a lot of my teenage time browsing 4chan, I'd say it's not 15%, but closer to 69% or even whole 420%. You just loose faith in humanity from spending too much time on the internet.
So we're writing off the methodologies of the entire field of psychology on the basis of numbers pulled out of your--on the basis of your gut feeling?
In fairness, Wafflemaker's gut feeling probably has a better track record.
Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except there's no mandate that "a male" and "a female" are of different noun classes, nor are the nouns for man/woman abnormally privileged in most cases. I know Dutch has fused masculine/feminine nouns into a "common" gender, leaving the language with effectively only the common and neuter genders. If I remember correctly, a similar thing has happened in Swedish and Danish. Some languages have various concepts of an…
Except for all the languages that actually call the grammatical concept: gender Edit: see German example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_German
Yeah man, I know that it's traditionally called gender, and I know that German has a gender and case system. I don't understand what the link you've posted has to do with my point, I'm really not sure what there is to misunderstand about what I'm saying.
To come all the way back to what my original comment was about -- a German speaker is not ascribing any sort of sociological femininity to words like Freiheit or Bundesanstalt, nor any sort of sociological masculinity to Anschluss or Wein, nor any lack thereof to Sicherheitsrelais or Volk. The objects in the language have a grammatical gender, not a sociological one. It would be interesting seeing research on what sociological gender speakers of a language with a gender system choose for an object they're personifying (especially inanimate ones), but I don't think a German necessarily thinks "I'm personifying this key, and it's a man because the noun is masculine". Does anybody here have any anecdotes?
Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of languages assign nouns to a noun class. They are (usually) not ascribing a biological gender to an object. "Gender" is a horrendously bad name for the concept.
French and Spanish literally use a contraction of the Latin for he and she for different objects though. This is also done in Swedish. Hon slår tolv. 'She strikes twelve', referring to the clock currently striking.
Are you talking about direct object pronouns? At least in the case of Spanish, lo/la is the pronoun for a masculine or feminine noun. It would obviously follow that it's the pronoun for a man and woman, respectively, the same way they would be the pronoun for any other masculine or feminine noun. I don't see how addressing men and women (as a noun) the same as you would any other noun in the language (save some irregularities) means that the cart is pulling the horse.
Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of languages assign nouns to a noun class. They are (usually) not ascribing a biological gender to an object. "Gender" is a horrendously bad name for the concept.
"Gender" referred only to grammar before it gained its modern meaning. The modern meaning was introduced in the 1950s/60s to differentiate social aspects (gender) from biological (sex). Of course people then started using it to just mean "sex", but if you use social definition I don't think it's a bad name for the concept.
Are you sure? That’s almost the opposite of what I heard, which was that “gender” being used to refer to -inity arose as a euphemism to avoid using the word “sex”, because the word “sex” came to be more associated with specifically “sex-acts” (and that prior to it being used as a euphemism in this way, it essentially meant something like kind/type/sort), and only after “gender” began being used as a euphemism in this way, did people begin using it to distinguish between “gender roles” and “sexes”.
Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
#97This topic has been of interest to me but I've approached it from different directions: Japanese Shintoism, the idea that objects can be numinous and panpsychism.
I wonder if the "sadness" referenced in the paper's title stems not from object personification itself, but from living in a culture that lacks frameworks for these experiences.
In cultures with concepts like Shinto kami (where objects can have spiritual essence) or similar animistic traditions, someone who senses that their broken tool has been "disrespected" or feels that a neglected room carries emotional weight wouldn't be pathologized. These experiences would have cultural validation and shared language.
Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
#98I don't have access to the full text, but based on the abstract I think it's likely that I relate to this phenomenon (I am autistic). My experience is not so much the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects, but I understand why this might be the only accessible language of expression. For me, if a useful object is damaged or otherwise loses its usefulness through neglect or malice, I experience som…
Object personification is if you would feel that the knife itself is sad, is hurting, etc., and you’d feel for it. If, on the other hand, you’re just sad yourself that the knife is dull, because that’s not how a knife is supposed to be, then that’s not personifying the knife, it’s more an aesthetic judgement about a state of affairs. Similarly for the room example. You feel emotional about the state of affairs that o…
It's hard to convey precisely what I mean, of course, but to try to clarify further I would say the emotion is experienced on behalf of the object itself in a direct way that does not involve my personal sense of self. I do not mind a dull knife at all, I feel no personal emotion in that sense. Either I sharpen it because it's mine or not. That's neutral.
So it's much closer to object personification because it's the same mechanism by which I empathize with other people, animals, etc. In my description I've tried to generalize because to me it's not accurate to say that I feel the knife is sad, but the experience is almost as if that were the case.
Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
#99Something I’ve been thinking about is whether it’s partly because people sometimes don’t really know how to describe what they’re feeling, so they end up putting those emotions onto objects. It kind of helps make sense of feelings that are hard to explain.
At the same time, I wonder if it’s always a good thing. Like, what happens if you lose or break something you’ve gotten really attached to? Could that make the anxiety worse?
Curious if anyone here has seen this or has any personal experience.
Re: Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)
#100It sounds that the paper indetified that autistic people do this at the same ratio everyone else? """ Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """
And perhaps more often than in the general population.