The Causes of Autism

This section of the library shall be dedicated to commentaries on the Hubermanlab podcast. Included below is not a summary of the episode (I’ll leave that for you to check out), but rather my comments on the episode in terms of psychology, health, and human behavior. Whenever possible, I draw connections to autism as well. Most of my comments originally appear on Twitter/X, so be sure to follow on there.

Emotional Intelligence and Body Awareness

I enjoyed Dr. Huberman’s question regarding the somatic portion of emotional intelligence, particularly the idea that highly emotionally intelligent people may have more body awareness.

Emoji-fication

The point about emoji use is interesting because it made me reflect upon my own habits. Admittedly, I use Microsoft Teams a lot more for work, even more so compared to how often I use text messaging to communicate. I certainly agree that the use of emojis can create difficulties in interpreting the emotional content of a written text. There is a lack of body language via text, which we would normally use to assess the mood of the conversation. In my work setting, I find myself using a combination of not just emojis, but also GIFs, to convey a clearer sense of emotional body language that might accompany my text. Dr. Brackett and I share something in common: karate. One of the few regrets I have in my life is that I was one karate exam away from earning a black belt in taekwondo. This was during my high school years, and at the time I thought it was the best decision to prioritize basketball, which had become my main sport, over karate, which became secondary. I really do miss the discipline of martial arts.

Social Media Behaviors

I loved Dr. Huberman’s question and comment regarding online behavior from scientists and how, at times, adults seem to act like children while children seem to act like adults. I confess that I find myself becoming more emotionally distant from many conversations on this platform, because, as he states, adults seem to behave like children. Dr. Huberman later said, at the end of his question, that he agrees, and I wholeheartedly concur, that the lack of face-to-face interaction is a culprit behind these behaviors. There’s a loss of accountability when people don’t have someone physically in front of them regulating emotions in the moment.

I found it fascinating that, at the beginning of the episode, Dr. Brackett mentioned that he and Dr. Huberman were regulating each other’s emotions as part of emotional intelligence. This was quite brilliant. There seems to be a lack of mutual emotion regulation in online interactions, especially when people are seeking emotional reinforcement for what they express on social media. In a previous episode of Huberman Lab with Dr. Zaki, it was discussed how people actively seek outrage on social media, partly due to negativity biases toward online content. So it would seem perhaps that the opposite of emotional regulation is in effect on various platforms: people want to actively rile each other up and piss each other off about some matter everybody is outraged over. Lately I’ve been questioning the social impact of this, regarding whether there are any true benefits of this or if it’s just an utter lack of productivity and whether it’s constructive at all.

Try to Make Yourself Happier?

I didn’t miss Dr. Brackett’s side comment about being against happiness research and the attempt to make oneself happier, such as by reflecting on how to be happier each day. I would be curious to explore that topic further. A preliminary hypothesis might be that the effectiveness of approaches to achieving happiness is mediated by how much a person identifies as ‘unhappy.’ In other words, happiness exercises might be more effective for someone who already identifies as a happy person and is simply trying to boost their happiness. Meanwhile, a person who identifies as unhappy and feels they must do happiness exercises every day just to overcome their unhappiness might struggle more with the process, because they are continually identifying as an unhappy person.

Introversion and Extroversion

Love the discussion on introversion and extroversion. Reflecting upon my own behaviors of introversion and extroversion, I feel like an introvert who is required to do a very extroverted job, but at the same time enjoys the extroverted components of my job, such as training people, working with children, and teaching them social skills. However, in my personal life, I feel like there’s a lot of introversion reflected because I don’t go to parties, I don’t go to bars, and I don’t generally enjoy activities that surround me with a lot of people. I often take measures to avoid crowds when I’m going to places where it’s expected to be crowded.

I recall my visit to the Grand Canyon earlier this year, and I specifically exerted effort to get away from people who seemed to want to be near each other. There I was, looking for a remote spot where I could enjoy the scenery by myself and not have to listen to other people’s chatter. Don’t get me wrong, I love people, but outside of work, I think my behaviors are much more introverted.

I empathize with Dr. Huberman stating that if he were to arrange a party, he would prefer to watch his friends who didn’t know each other interact with one another. However, I feel this would be more applicable to me in a setting where I don’t know anyone and I might find myself less willing to exert the energy to meet new people. I’d rather take a step back and watch other people’s behavior to determine if I might get along with someone in the first place before talking to someone who I might otherwise assess to be an “energy drainer.”

Neuroticism and Emotional Intelligence

The lack of correlation between personality traits, specifically neuroticism, and emotional intelligence was interesting to discover. Perhaps this particular relationship is mediated by the degree to which a person is self-aware of their own emotions and the factors contributing to various emotional states. So, perhaps a person who is highly neurotic but also highly aware of all the factors contributing to their emotional states (high intrapersonal intelligence) would exhibit high emotional intelligence. I wonder if a person with high levels of neuroticism but little to no understanding of their emotions would exhibit low levels of emotional intelligence. I’d love to know if that research has been done. Is there a separate measure of emotional intelligence for interpersonal versus intrapersonal intelligence, as in the conceptualization of Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences? Are they related to one another? Or do measures of emotional intelligence capture both interpersonal emotional intelligence and intrapersonal emotional intelligence? The reason I ask is because if the literature assumes that latest emotional intelligence measure captures both interpersonal and intrapersonal emotional intelligence, then the conclusion would be that emotional intelligence is not correlated to neuroticism…..unless perhaps if it’s separated out into differences between high versus low intrapersonal intelligence.

Impermanence of Emotions

I loved the comment about the boy who indicated that he didn’t need a strategy to get out of the blue zone, and when asked why not, he said, “because it’s impermanent.” Amazing. This also makes me laugh because I specifically use zones of regulation with various children with autism to teach them to use strategies to regulate their emotions.

Here’s a funny one for you: I asked a crying child what zone he was in, and he told me he was in the green zone (the happy zone). I told him that his behaviors actually looked like he was in the blue zone, but he continued to cry and insist that he was in the green zone. To me, this communicated that he didn’t want to be perceived as being in an unhappy state, but also that he didn’t want to acknowledge that he wasn’t in a happy state. Multiple things going on at once. Teaching emotion regulation to some children with autism is no walk in the park.

Question by Dr. Brackett: What are two things that get in the way of giving other people permission to feel?

Paused this before I had a chance to listen to Dr. Huberman’s hypothesis or the answer.

My thought: 1. The degree to which you give yourself permission to feel your own emotions in various situations, which is impacted by how you view emotions in general or the willingness to deal with and manage your own versus suppressing them.

2. Parental behavior models regarding emotions. Earlier in the episode, Dr. Brackett mentioned his own family history of emotional intelligence, and as a behavior analyst, I can only view this from the perspective of models of human behavior. These are often subconsciously internalized and imitated until later in life, when we resolve them after realizing that certain traits we picked up from our parents were less than adaptive.

Dr. Huberman stated that he believes people without proper emotional boundaries may be too empathically attuned to the emotions of someone else, which may not allow them to feel their own emotions because it becomes personal. To share a bit of my professional background, this is something many ABA practitioners have to face when working with children and parents with autism. We want to be behavior models, demonstrating the highest levels of emotional regulation in extremely tough situations, such as a tantruming child engaging in property destruction. We aim to stay collected, although to some extent, this can backfire, as we may not validate emotions and just allow the parent to feel their frustration. I think my way of getting around this barrier has been to allow parents to vent to me about their frustration, letting them express what they need to, while at the same time modeling calm, constructive, and problem-solving behaviors.

Side Comment

The story about Dr. Brackett and his mother-in-law was perhaps one of the rare times on the Huberman Lab episodes that I burst out laughing.

Students Feel More Envy than Stress

The conversation about envy has been a surprising twist in the episode on emotional intelligence. It was quite surprising to learn that the students primarily reported feeling envy rather than stress.

I would jump to thoughts regarding a lot of television programming these days being centered around “Upward Social Comparison,” which is the opposite of one of the components in the definition of the gratitude-happiness literature “Downward Social Comparison” (boy, I need to go back and catch up and see what’s going on in that literature). Upward social comparison I would argue fosters feelings of inadequacy and not feeling ‘like enough,’ as was mentioned in the discussion around envy. For me, the epitome of this was the MTV show called “Cribs” although since then there are now many other shows that I have never seen and I’m glad have not.

I take my daily gratitude practice quite seriously, and I’m acutely aware of things that impact feelings of contentment regarding my own life, so shows like that drive me quite crazy. Of course, I would like to see a study that assesses the impact of the type of TV shows people watch—shows in which a person will undoubtedly engage in Upward Social Comparison—and whether that impacts envy. How “Upward Social Comparison” is defined would perhaps have to be broken into various domains, such as beauty, wealth, job type, etc if such a variable has never been defined before.

Emotional Intelligence Strategies

Loved the discussion of the different strategies that Dr. Brackett uses, specifically highlighting one strategy he employed during a difficult dinner with his father, when he started imagining his father as if he were a television screen and sort of dissociated from the intensity of the emotions.

As a BCBA in the field of Applied Behavior Analysis, there are many social situations that require heightened levels of emotional intelligence. I would argue that for many people who have a growth mindset about this type of job and view it as an opportunity for emotional development, there is much to gain from working in this field.

When working with a child who is having an absolute tantrum or meltdown, it is very useful to not internalize the child’s emotions in order to maintain a clear mind regarding how the behavior should be managed by yourself, the staff, and the parent. Internalizing the emotions and using circular reasoning to explain the behavior, such as saying “he’s crying because he’s sad,” isn’t useful from a behavioral analytic perspective. So there has to be a delicate balance between empathizing with the child, understanding and validating the parent’s emotions, and at the same time dissociating just enough to have a clear clinical perspective regarding how to manage the child’s emotions to provide a directive to staff and family.

Conversely, managing emotions in this field can be challenging. I recently found myself in a situation where I was providing feedback to a staff member who is older than me and in a subordinate position. I found myself on the receiving end of very direct defensiveness regarding the feedback, with the staff member justifying previous behaviors, blaming the parents, and displaying an overall negative emotional reaction to constructive criticism. Most recently, major resistance to feedback occurred in front of a parent. I handled myself very calmly and professionally, though, and later earned myself a compliment from the parent who told me they “could tell the difference between a Scorpio who has done a lot of inner work (me) compared to one who hasn’t (the subordinate). The Scorpio bit was quite funny, but it was a nice badge to earn from a caregiver after being challenged to remain calm by a staff member rather than a child, as I am typically accustomed to.

High school students’ feelings while in school—fascinating results of the study that the primary emotions are boredom and stress

The section of the episode was particularly moving in discussing how we can make an active choice regarding our emotional output and its appropriateness for a given situation. Dr. Brackett used the example of how he was actively making a choice to present the findings of his study to the U.S. Secretary of Education and whether he wanted to be like a yoga teacher, which was hilarious, or if he was going to bring fire and energy. He ended up deciding to go with the energetic approach. The reason I find this particular section moving is that as I continue to read the autism literature and am inundated by social media on the topic of autism and vaccines, I have predominantly been exposed to the fiery, energetic approach.

As I mentioned last week on Dr. Zakis episode, I’ve been experiencing outrage burnout. Viewed from an emotional intelligence perspective, perhaps this can be viewed as simply growing tired of the fiery, red energetic approach. This is not to say I don’t understand the full breadth of the autism literature (I don’t eat this outrage burnout to be misinterpreted as a lack of empathy), but I have begun to question whether that fiery, red approach is the one that best fits me and who I am as a person.

Now, I find myself questioning whether the fiery, red, energetic approach is the best one for addressing this literature. It certainly seems appropriate given the 1 in 36 autism rate. However, discussing the social aspects of the autism literature, there may be one group of individuals that is highly receptive to this approach, but there is certainly another portion of the population that, for lack of a better term, doesn’t want to hear it and believes that autism is solely genetic —thus perhaps necessitating the calm, collected and scientific approach.

There is a very, very delicate and intricate social aspect regarding public reception of the autism literature, and it’s something I am working on fully understanding. The fiery, energetic approach has worked to obtain the awareness of one subset of the population, but is that approach the best one for the more scientifically minded academic community? I would say that many people don’t know the extent of the autism-pesticides literature or the autism air-pollution literature, and it’s very concerning.

What I’m trying to communicate here is that perhaps different portions of the population need different approaches to how the autism literature is presented to them. Of course, I think this would require a careful analysis of awareness of autism literature. These days, more people are aware of autism-vaccine debate and less so of other factors connected to autism diagnosis.

To summarize, there is certainly a social psychology to autism awareness and research, and most certainly an emotional intelligence approach is going to be very useful for addressing it, both for parents of children on the autism spectrum and for adults with a diagnosis of autism. For example, I hypothesize that adults with a diagnosis of autism who heavily identify with the diagnosis as an identity—referring to themselves and other individuals with autism as “neurodivergent”—would be less educated on environmental toxins that lead to an autism diagnosis. I think this is one of the barriers to public receptivity to the autism-toxins literature.

Gratitude Antidote for Envy

Love Dr. Brackett discussing that gratitude is perhaps one of the best antidotes to envy. Yay! Go gratitude—truly an underrated emotion. And, as Dr. Brackett mentioned, a lot of people assume that practicing gratitude means you have to force yourself into a state of contentment, but that’s not the case at all. One can be grateful for what one has, while at the same time striving for more.

Bullying

That the data shows there has been no decrease in bullying over 35 years is a surprise because it often seems we laud ourselves as a highly civilized society that advances year after year.

I myself was the victim of bullying in high school, primarily by the basketball team that I was recruited into due to my height in my freshman year (standing now at 6 foot five). I regret prioritizing basketball over obtaining my black belt in karate, which I’ve said before, but part of the reason I regret having stayed in basketball for all those years is because of the bullying. Almost 20 years after my high school graduation, I look back and wonder why the heck I put up with what I did. I wonder to myself how I allowed myself to be treated in a certain way.

My honest answer to myself is that I simply didn’t know any better. Going into high school, I had already come from a background of awkward relationships with peers, particularly male peers, as there had only been four males in my eighth-grade graduating class. I went to a remote elementary school. The entire eight grades (K-8) had just a little over 100 students. Four males and, I believe, 12 females in our eighth-grade graduating class, and the social relationships there had been quite damaged with my male peers because there was a lack of ability to form new friendships as a consequence of going to a small school.

Those relationships had been damaged, I hypothesize, in part due to the 1st through 4th grade teacher setting my desk away from other peers because I was having trouble paying attention in the classroom. There were repercussions that the teacher wasn’t aware of, as I can certainly see how young children might misinterpret a teacher’s intention to isolate me from the rest of the classroom in order to minimize distractions as a form of social ostracism, thinking something might be wrong with me. So friendships during elementary school were scarce, although it’s not like I didn’t talk to anyone. I certainly did on bus rides home and whatnot. I have a friend now, whom I keep in touch with, that I’ve known since fifth grade, and our relationship has gotten stronger since high school.

I digress. To the point about bullying, it’s sort of ironic, given that there’s so much public awareness around bullying, that it hasn’t decreased at all over the decades. My first thought is the possible connection between the mental health of parents and the likelihood of bullying in their offspring. I do wonder at times, perhaps this is a cliché interpretation that has little to no research behind it, but I do wonder if those who bully are using it as a form of catharsis as a consequence of other problems in their home life. So that’s where I would draw a connection between the mental health of the parents—which can take many forms—impacting the likelihood of bullying. Then there are the social aspects of bullying, where peers give in to peer pressure and bully someone else in order to retain the social relationships they’ve had for years, rather than going through the effort of discarding a long-term friendship and forming a new one because of disagreeing with bullying.

So that would be my hypothesis: if the research hasn’t been done already, how much does poor mental health and a troubled home life impact the bullying behaviors of offspring, and what factors moderate that relationship, such as the types of friendships that the children form, friendships that may foster bullying, dominate, etc.? I’m sure there’s a social component to it as well.

Dr. Brackett mirrored a fear of mine when he shared his anecdote about the professor showing the video clip of him being horrifically bullied as a young kid: I dread the thought of facing previous bullies for fear of regressing back into a teenager. So it’s not so much the bullying I think that I’m afraid of now, but perhaps I’m more afraid of the thought of regressing back to a previous mental state I worked so hard to leave behind.

Final Thoughts

I’m surprised I had so much to say on this episode. I’m going to have to check my other commentaries and see if this was the longest one, and I’ve written quite a few commentaries on Huberman Lab episodes. I have to say I really needed to hear this one, and it really validated a lot of what I’ve been going through in my anonymous endeavor. I certainly feel like I had permission to feel (pun intended), because truth be told, I’ve been conflicted between feelings of guilt over the emotional intelligence aspect of managing the autism literature. Everyone has unique and different emotional needs, and for me, this episode came at the right time in my professional development. So thank you again—this particular conversation was extremely gratifying. And I make a point to rarely use the word “extremely.”

Plot twist: remember how I mentioned that I prioritized basketball over getting my black belt?

This means technically I could have fought back and knocked around some heads against the bullies. I had the skill, the height, and I had the strength.

What I didn’t have was: intent to harm.
I didn’t have an ounce of aggression.
Didn’t want to hurt anyone.
I never retaliated.

I fondly remembered just now being called a ‘jolly green giant’ a few times in high school.