…is personifying and assigning feelings to inanimate objects part of autism?
I’ve had issues with that in the past
Abstract
Object personification is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human agents. In online forums, autistic individuals commonly report experiencing this phenomenon. Given that approximately half of all autistic individuals experience difficulties identifying their own emotions, the suggestion that object personification may be a feature of autism seems almost paradoxical. Why would a person experience sympathy for objects, when they struggle to understand and verbalise the emotions of other people as well as their own? An online survey was used to assess tendency for personification in 87 autistic and 263 non-autistic adults. 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. Given that in many cases, autistic people report their personification experiences as distressing, it is important to consider the reasons for the increased personification and identify structures for support.
Full text on Sci-Hub (paper’s only a few pages long)
Interesting. I don’t think it applies to my situation so much. I have that, but if anything, I’m hyper sensitive of mine and others emotions, to the point that I people please at a detriment to my own well being.
Ah, that’s not autism. It’s the personality trait of Agreeableness. Go search for big 5 personality traits and see if “high agreeableness” matches your experience.
Highly disagreeable people won’t do anything they don’t want to do. They’ll do their own thing rather than go with the group. This can cause them fucked-up personal relationships because this makes people feel bad. High agreeableness people place the group’s well-being above their own, which can also cause them to have fucked-up personal relationships.
This reminds me of reading Marie Kondo who, before giving away/getting rid of things, she would say (I’m not checking spelling) osukaresamadesuta (oh-scar-e-sama-desh-ta) which is like, thank you for your hard work. It is like releasing the item from its duty to you to either rest or have purpose is someone else’s life.
As with any symptom, in isolation it means nothing, and if it doesn’t actual cause you a problem or undue mental strain it’s fine. But if it is in conjunction with other symptoms or on its own is a source of suffering you might want to look into it more.
I think a lot of us have some sort of shall we say, parasocial relationships with people and things.
It’s not a whole lot different from when me and my cat are vibin’. We can’t understand each other, but we both still get a lot of comfort out of each other’s presence. It’s nice to have a “relationship” where you don’t have to bare emotional burden sometimes.
![[CW: Ableism] Crass(cdn.discordapp.com)](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/971551268650762271/1028496930147405874/unknown-191.png){kind=link}