An Expert Discussion on Autism and Empathy

Autism in Adulthood strives to be a home for constructive interprofessional dialogue on pressing issues that affect the lives of autistic adults. We do this in a number of ways. One is to hold roundtable discussions with experts in the field. Our first roundtable discussion concerns the topic of autism and empathy, a hotly debated construct within and outside academia.1 As early as 1962, psychologists described children with “autistic psychopathy” as being “unable to achieve empathy.”2 An empathy deficit has since become a core feature in many conceptualizations of autism, including the theory of mind (or mind-blindness) model and the empathizing-systematizing model.3 Researchers have distinguished between cognitive empathy (or theory of mind; the capacity to understand another person's perspective or mental state) and emotional or affective empathy (the capacity to experience affective reactions to the observed experiences of others), asserting that autistic individuals have deficits in the former, but not in the latter.4,5 Even this position, however, has been widely criticized by autistic individuals in online forums. For example, purported deficits in cognitive empathy may be a problem of experiencing too much emotional empathy or of needing more time to process empathy's cognitive aspects.6 Or they may be due to a breakdown in mutual understanding between people who experience the world differently (and may apply just as much to neurotypical people failing to empathize with autistic people as it does in the opposite direction).7 Autistic adults often argue that the notion that autistic individuals lack empathy or theory of mind is dehumanizing and perpetuates dangerous stereotypes and oversimplifications.6 Following is a transcript of our roundtable discussion, with minor edits for clarity

Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publishing in Journal of Librarianship & Information Science on 01/05/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000617709061 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is the comic book, for which male reviewers prefer female authors, despite their scarcity. A word frequency analysis suggested that authors wrote, and reviewers valued, gendered aspects of books within a genre. For example, relationships and romance were disproportionately mentioned by women in mystery and fantasy novels. These results show that, perhaps for the first time, it is possible to get large scale evidence about the reception of books by typical readers, if they post reviews online

Attributing minds to vampires in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend

For Palmer (2004, 2010), and other proponents of a cognitive narratology, research into real-world minds in the cognitive sciences provides insights into readers’ experiences of fictional minds. In this article, I explore the application of such research to the minds constructed for the vampire characters in Richard Matheson’s (1954) science fiction/horror novel I Am Legend. I draw upon empirical research into ‘mind attribution’ in social psychology, and apply Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), and its notion of ‘construal’, as a framework for the application of such findings to narrative. In my analysis, I suggest that readers’ attribution of mental-states to the vampires in Matheson’s novel is strategically limited through a number of choices in their linguistic construal. Drawing on online reader responses to the novel, I argue that readers’ understanding of these other minds plays an important role in their empathetic experience and their ethical judgement of the novel’s main character and focaliser, Robert Neville. Finally, I suggest that the limited mind attribution for the vampires invited through their construal contributes to the presentation of a ‘mind style’ (Fowler, 1977) for this character

Regina v John Terry: The discursive construction of an alleged racist event

This article explores the conformation in discourse of a verbal exchange and its subsequent mediatised and legal ramifications. The event concerns an allegedly racist insult directed by high- profile English professional footballer John Terry towards another player, Anton Ferdinand, during a televised match in October 2011. The substance of Terry’s utterance, which included the noun phrase ‘fucking black cunt’, was found by a Chief Magistrate not to be a racist insult, although the fact that these actual words were framed within the utterance was not in dispute. The upshot of this ruling was that Terry was acquitted of a racially aggravated public order offence. A subsequent investigation by the regulatory commission of the English Football Association (FA) ruled, almost a year after the event, that Terry was guilty of racially abusing Ferdinand. Terry was banned for four matches and fined £220,000. It is our contention that this event, played out in legal rulings, social media and print and broadcast media, constitutes a complex web of linguistic structures and strategies in discourse, and as such lends itself well to analysis with a broad range of tools from pragmatics, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics. Among other things, such an analysis can help explain the seemingly anomalous – even contradictory – position adopted in the legal ruling with regard to the speech act status of ‘fucking black cunt’; namely, that the racist content of the utterance was not contested but that the speaker was found not to have issued a racist insult. Over its course, the article addresses this broader issue by making reference to the systemic- functional interpersonal function of language, particularly to the concepts of modality, polarity and modalisation. It also draws on models of verbal irony from linguistic pragmatics, notably from the theory of irony as echoic mention. Furthermore, the article makes use of the cognitive-linguistic framework Text World Theory to examine the discourse positions occupied by key actors and adapts, from cognitive poetics, the theory of mind-modelling to explore the conceptual means through which these actors discursively negotiate the event. It is argued that the pragmatic and cognitive strategies that frame the entire incident go a long way towards mitigating the impact of so ostensibly stark an act of racial abuse. Moreover, it is suggested here that the reconciliation of Terry’s action was a result of the confluence of strategies of discourse with relations of power as embodied by the media, the law and perceptions of nationhood embraced by contemporary football culture. It is further proposed that the outcome of this episode, where the FA was put in the spotlight, and where both the conflict and its key antagonists were ‘intranational’, was strongly impelled by the institution of English football and its governing body both to reproduce and maintain social, cultural and ethnic cohesion and to avoid any sense that the event featured a discernible ‘out-group’

Mind-modelling with corpus stylistics in David Copperfield

We suggest an innovative approach to literary discourse by using corpus linguistic methods to address research questions from cognitive poetics. In this article, we focus on the way that readers engage in mind-modelling in the process of characterisation. The article sets out our cognitive poetic model of characterisation that emphasises the continuity between literary characterisation and real-life human relationships. The model also aims to deal with the modelling of the author’s mind in line with the modelling of the minds of fictional characters. Crucially, our approach to mind-modelling is text-driven. Therefore we are able to employ corpus linguistic techniques systematically to identify textual patterns that function as cues triggering character information. In this article, we explore our understanding of mind-modelling through the characterisation of Mr. Dick from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Using the CLiC tool (Corpus Linguistics in Cheshire) developed for the exploration of 19th-century fiction, we investigate the textual traces in non-quotations around this character, in order to draw out the techniques of characterisation other than speech presentation. We show that Mr. Dick is a thematically and authorially significant character in the novel, and we move towards a rigorous account of the reader’s modelling of authorial intention

Interacting with Fictions:The Role of Pretend Play in Theory of Mind Acquisition

Pretend play is generally considered to be a developmental landmark in Theory of Mind acquisition. The aim of the present paper is to offer a new account of the role of pretend play in Theory of Mind development. To this end I combine Hutto and Gallagher’s account of social cognition development with Matravers’ recent argument that the cognitive processes involved in engagement with narratives are neutral regarding fictionality. The key contribution of my account is an analysis of pretend play as interaction with fictions. I argue that my account offers a better explanation of existing empirical data on the development of children’s pretend play and Theory of Mind than the competing theories from Leslie, Perner and Harris

Construing the child reader: a cognitive stylistic analysis of the opening to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2009) charts the story of Nobody Owens, a boy who is adopted by supernatural entities in the local graveyard after his family is murdered. This article draws on the notion of the “construed reader,” and combines two cognitive stylistic frameworks to analyse the opening section of the novel. In doing so, the article explores the representation and significance of the family home in relation to what follows in the narrative. The analysis largely draws on Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007), but also integrates some aspects of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), which allows for a more nuanced discussion of textual features. The article pays particular attention to the way Gaiman frames his narrative and positions his reader to view the fictional events from a distinctive vantage point and subsequently demonstrates that a stylistic analysis of children’s literature can lay bare how such writing is designed with a young readership in mind

Mind, absent characters, and the deployment of ideology in Henry James’s short fiction

This paper examines the role of ideology in the construction of absent characters in Henry James’s short fiction against a methodological background of cognitive narratology and the attendant notions of metarepresentation, extended mind, and distributed identity. Building on the conviction that those minds that communally assemble absent characters by projecting subjective images of them do form identifiable ideological systems rather than arbitrary arrays, an approach to the construction of absent Louisa Brash in “The Beldonald Holbein” (1901) is made in the context of “Daisy Miller” (1878), “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884), and “The Next Time” (1895). Published in three different decades, these stories display absent and quasi‐absent characters who are conjured up for the reader in much the same way as Mrs. Brash is, namely as functions of a priori ideological positions based on sequenced degrees of commitment to the thematic dominant of a tale, a process that often results in deeply conflicted identities.US Fulbright Program/Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport, Grant/Award Number: PRX16/00265