There’s an interesting tension in the autism world between research on interoception and on autistic people’s self-reports, on our introspections.

Interoception is our ability to be aware of our own bodies, and some research suggests that interoceptive abilities are reduced in autism (Mul et al., 2018; Palser et al., 2018).  Interoception is believed to be related to alexithymia (Mul et al., 2018; Shah et al., 2016), awareness of one’s own emotional states, which also appears to be reduced in autism (Milosavljevic et al., 2016).  Thus, there’s a sense in which autistic people struggle to have insight into ourselves.  In the real world, this might manifest itself when we struggle with personal hygiene, or don’t notice when we start to get agitated.

If autistic people struggle with self-insight, then it follows that we ought to be bad at introspection, at examining our own minds and thoughts.  In theory, this would make self-reports and qualitative studies with autistic people unreliable.  Thus, researchers might be able to use the idea of autistic interoception deficits to justify excluding autistic people’s perspectives from their studies.

Fortunately – and I say fortunately because I think history tells us that excluding any group from the production of knowledge about itself rarely ends well – I don’t think our self-reports are unreliable.[1]

While it’s true that autistic people may struggle with interoception and internal awareness, many of us are also deeply conscious of being different from others around us.  Even if introspection doesn’t come naturally to us, we often spend a lot of time introspecting, because we wonder about these differences.  Those who don’t have an autism diagnosis might be especially introspective, as they struggle to understand what is “wrong” with them, but those of us who are diagnosed will have the advantage of being able to learn about autism and use this information to scaffold our own introspections.  As we age, and spend more and more time thinking about our minds, we’ll steadily develop a richer awareness of our mental lives.

Thus, while an autistic person might not be terribly good at personal hygiene or reporting their emotional state at any particular moment, I think many autistic people actually have outstanding self-knowledge when it comes to the big things: things like our basic personalities, or like how we experience the world.  I think our self-knowledge can often exceed that of neurotypicals, who might rarely have had cause to ask such fundamental questions about their identities and place in the world.

This should, I hope, reassure anyone with doubts about the value of self-reports and introspection in autism research.

Ultimately, let’s not forget that autistic people are the only people who can directly experience the world as we do, and we’re the only ones who can describe those experiences.

Footnotes

[1] Well, more unreliable than anyone else’s.

References

Milosavljevic, B., Carter Leno, V., Simonoff, E., Baird, G., Pickles, A., Jones, C. R. G., … Happé, F. (2016). Alexithymia in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder: Its relationship to internalising difficulties, sensory modulation and social cognition. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46(4), 1354–1367. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-015-2670-8

Mul, C., Stagg, S. D., Herbelin, B., & Aspell, J. E. (2018). The feeling of me feeling for you: Interoception, alexithymia and empathy in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 48(9), 2953-2967. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3564-3

Palser, E. R., Fotopoulou, A., Pellicano, E., & Kilner, J. M. (2018). The link between interoceptive processing and anxiety in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder: extending adult findings into a developmental sample. Biological Psychology, 136, 13–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.05.003

Shah, P., Hall, R., Catmur, C., & Bird, G. (2016). Alexithymia, not autism, is associated with impaired interoception. Cortex, 81, 215–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2016.03.021