Understanding Emotions in Others - Essay Example

They have improper or non-existent mirror neuron activity.

Dapretto et al (2006) gave autistic and non-autistic students a task to do while using an fMRI. Children with autism were able to do the chosen task just as well but showed no mirror neuron activity. This might mean that autistics learn how to do things, model things from others, and so on in very different ways. Further, the researchers found that activity in the area predicted social skills: The less activity, the worse the patients' social skills. It may be that part of the difficulty that autistics have relating to others, understanding their emotions, understanding why they don't do “rational” things, and other difficulties is the lack or improper functioning of these mirror neurons. The brain is simply less capable of handling the tasks that normal people take for granted, like being able to learn how to do something by watching other people doing it.

What this indicates is that hypersensitivity may be partially caused by a failure of mirror neurons. Though the science is unclear thus far as to the causes, the fact that there is a basic neuronal deficit means that instructors need to learn how to teach autistics differently, since regular modeling techniques might be more difficult and might incur their hypersensitivity issues. And instructors need to teach autistic to be empathic to the needs of others in different ways than they normally would since autistic children will have to be forming that skill through wholly different means than normal. Read More