Well, this never looks good

[elfs]

Empathy:
13.

Scoring:
0 - 32 = low (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 20)
33 - 52 = average (most women score about 47 and most men score about 42)
53 - 63 is above average
64 - 80 is very high
80 is maximum

Autism: 38

Scoring:
0 - 10 = low
11 - 22 = average (most women score about 15 and most men score about 17)
23 - 31 = above average
32 - 50 is very high (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 35)
50 is maximum

Comments

[ai731.livejournal.com]

What's your Myers-Briggs type? Most INTJs (and anyone who's strongly NT) score in the Asperger's/Autism range on this sort of quiz.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm an INTJ. No surprise there, either.

Does Not Compute

[(Anonymous)]

But if you have autistic tendencies, then how is it that you can write eloquently about your characters' emotional states and maintain your many relationships?

If this is mental illness, then I don't want to be well.

Of course, maybe this quiz has all the relevance of a Cosmo survey.

Re: Does Not Compute

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Sure it does. In fact, it makes more sense. Normal human beings don't spend a lot of time processing their social feelings; they just work. Aspy's and ADD's (I've long known I have the latter; I've never been diagnosed with the former and I don't think at this point that it would serve any purpose if I were) are probably better at writing about these things precisely because they think about what those relationships are.

I mean, read any book where characters are thinking "deeply" about their relationships. Do real people think like that, or do they only wish that they did?

Re: Does Not Compute

[elfric.livejournal.com]

As an INTP who is also ADD, I totally agree with your assessment. I have actually spent time thinking about how people interact, why they do what they do, why they think what they do, etc. From what I can tell, that sort of thing is intuitively obvious to most people.

Re: Does Not Compute

[dougs.livejournal.com]

I score low for Empathy and high for Autism, and yet people seem to think that I can write about the state of a protagonist's mind and emotions. I hadn't seen a theory to account for this until now.

That's a very helpful analysis, thank you.

(I'm INTP, occasionally INTJ)

Typo!

[dougs.livejournal.com]

I'm ISTP, occasionally ISTJ. Oops.

Re: Does Not Compute

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I'm an INTJ (I saw your later post, so I know it's an S), but only weakly J, ocassionally sliding in P depending on the day I take the test. As a writer, I sometimes have characters who don't introspect and I have problems writing them. I know there are people like that, but how do you deal with someone who seems to have little or no inner life? I have a serious problem empathising with and making seem human those kinds of people.

Re: Does Not Compute

[dougs.livejournal.com]

Ah, it looks like I don't write characters who don't introspect. I don't write them in detail anyway -- bit players who aren't core to the piece don't count.
Because I'm a slash writer and very rarely produce original characters, as a result I very rarely have to build a character from scratch. Even so, if I place a canonically non-introspective character at the centre of one of my pieces, you can bet I'll have plenty of introspection going on.

Sometime I might raise this question in my own journal. (Not now -- bedtime UK time).

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the test is calibrated to normal folk and not bright folk.

I got an 11 on the empathy, but 21 on the Spectrum.

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

Well, now I'm confused. Because I'm intelligent, and display a lot of the symptoms (so much so that my roommate thought I was Asperger's because of my tendency to blurt out insensitive remarks and hyperfocus), but I also showed normal range of empathy.

Personally, I may just be weird.

I don't know who your anonymous friend is, but that's what I would have thought about you, too. I guess your explanation makes sense. I don't really know what normal people think like. I'd like to have a life someday where my emotions are not the huge thing I have to contend with to do what I want to do.

Tagline of the day: I don't want to BE normal. I just want to keep an eye on it in case it makes any sudden moves.

[(Anonymous)]

Elf, I took the test and came out Empathy:15 (probably about right) and Autism:23 (probably a bit low - there were some wobblers). Yup, another male with an INT[JP] on the Myers-Briggs test.

I like your writing, in part, because you *do* think about why people tick - I know why *I* do things, but I sometimes have to approach other's motivations from first principles.

Javahead

Another test, another diagnosis

[(Anonymous)]

Another male, INT[JP]--14 on empathy.

With all due respect....

[(Anonymous)]

These online polls are trash -- they're just fun games that have rarely been subjected to any kind of empirical scrutiny and have no predictive power whatsoever.

The Myers-Briggs type indicator is an exemplar of this -- an arbitrary selection of binary questions indicating qualities derived unscientifically from a mistreading of Jung that even Jung found the time to ridicule.

Also

[(Anonymous)]

Bear in mind that personality tests that have been the focus of dozens of studies, which contain hundreds of questions, and which have many 'scales' against which facts are compared, are still very poor predictors of anything at all.

If the MMPI-2 can't tell you crap about anything, what do you think 30 questions do? Especially when they transparently fail to conceal the scales they represent, asking you over and over again in different forms ("Are you a or b?") whether you meet the criterion for the scale (empathy, extroversion, whatever)

INTJ

[adimap.livejournal.com]

well i was just searching for relations between INTJ and autism and stumbled onto this website and now i find out it is a writer's group Awesome! that makes me wonder how many authors are INTJ and if anyone else feels completely alienated at most times.