Appreciating Differences - Jack Falt - Ottawa area, Ontario, Canada

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It All Depends

A complaint I often heard when I was administering the MBTI® to a group was: “Well, it all depends.” I then told them to try to decide their responses as if it didn’t depend on anything other than their preferences. Now in my presentation to prepare the group to answer the MBTI® I emphasise this before they take the indicator. The whole idea of the indicator is to measure preferences, and this implies that for most of people they could do either but they prefer to do one over the other.
 I find that older clients often have more difficulty deciding their preferences because of their life experiences. Likely they have had to use all of the eight preferences, and now they are so skilled at using them that it really is hard to decide which are their preferences. (In fact, when answering an Enneagram sorter, people are asked to answer as they would have back when they were twenty.)

In this article one dimension of behaviour I would like to discuss is the Thinking-Feeling dimension. What about those people at the extremes? We do have a group of people who have great difficulty with the feeling preference. Their social skills are very limited. They have difficulty understanding what the others are feeling. They prefer not to interact with others, and even shy away from contact with others. What they prefer is systematising. These people are diagnosed as being autistic, or having Asperger Syndrome (AS), a milder form of autism. Although Asperger wrote a paper in German in the 1940s, it was not translated until 1997, so the knowledge of AS is fairly recent in the English speaking world.

I became interested autism and AS when my grandson was diagnosed with a mild form of AS. His Grade Three teacher noticed it and his tests confirmed it. For him it was the difficulty of following instruction in a noisy classroom. Fortunately, now he is getting therapy. As well his teacher wears an FM microphone and he wears earphones. He thought this was ‘cool’ and the therapist came into the class to explain to the class their purpose. The class all got to try on the earphones so they accepted them without any difficulty. Another place where my grandson had a problem was in a swimming pool where the noise echoes around, making it hard to comprehend instructions. It just seems to overwhelm him to a certain extent. Also, he does seem to have difficulty in understanding how his actions affect others.
 I came across a book entitled The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth about Autism by Simon Baron-Cohen (Basic Books, 2003). His research and the research of others postulates that there are ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains. The male brain is right-hemisphere dominant while the female brain is left-hemisphere dominant. Some people are almost equal in their ability to use both hemispheres. As well, males can be identified as having a ‘female’ brain and females can be identified as having a ‘male’ brain. The right hemisphere of the brain is better at spatial relationships, while the left hemisphere is better at languages. (It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course.) Overall, males are better at systematising and females are better at empathising. The terms systematizing and empathising, I would suggest, correlate quite closely to the thinking and feeling preferences. The statistics on the T-M dimension of the Form M show that more men than women have a preference for thinking and more women than men have a preference for feeling.

Little boys, generally, are more interested in figuring out how things work, playing with inanimate objects such as cars and trucks, and reading about factual material. My son as a little boy loved to have a book about fire trucks read to him over and over. The text was filled with statistics about how much water it could hold and how fast it could pump the water. Little girls, generally, are more likely to play with dolls and stuffed toys, playing pretend with other girls, role play and dressing up. One woman remembers how her politically correct parents gave her trucks to play with and she put a dress on them. Of course, individual children may enjoy playing with toys usually favoured by the opposite sex. Another grandson at age four was fascinated by Barbie dolls. He alternately carried it around in a caring way and also used it to hammer on things.

Autism and AS is ten times more common in boys than girls. Baron-Cohen believes that the difference is the amount of fetal testosterone produced that masculinizes the brain. Experiments have been performed on rats, showing that injecting testosterone in the fetus makes it easier for the rat when grown up to navigate mazes. Systematisers are better at learning a logical sequences and thus are better at learning directions. They are also better at finding their way starting from another direction. The opposite of systematisers are empathisers. Empathisers tend to look for landmarks when trying to find their way rather than remembering a sequence of turns.

Higher functioning AS children often grow up and can function very well in society. Since this syndrome was only discovered recently, sometimes adults (usually men) will read about AS and wonder if they have it. They often have difficulty making friends and being in social situations. If they are high functioning AS, they tend to be in careers in mathematics and science.

Baron-Cohen postulates that there is likely an equal population who are very high on the  empathy scale and very low on systematising. Probably these people are very competent caregivers and are not as noticeable in society, and thus have not been identified as having a syndrome.

Since what Baron-Cohen calls systematising and empathising are likely very close to thinking and feeling preferences as measured by the MBTI®, I think it is worth being aware of these extremes and considering whether a client might have AS. Of course the MBTI® does not diagnose AS or autism, but if doing follow up counselling, you might investigate the client’s ability to relate to others. However, most AS individuals are not too likely to participate in group administrations of the MBTI®, but might show up as individual clients particularly as a result of career assessment.

Just as I finished writing this article, I received a book that would appear to support my ideas. It is Sundial: Theoretical Relationships Between Psychological Type, Talent and Diseases by Barbara E. Bryden, Ph.D. (CAPT, 2005)

Another book that might be worth investigating is Shadow Syndromes: Recognizing and Coping with Hidden Psychological Disorders that Can Influence Your Behaviour and Silently Determine the Course of Your Whole Life by John. Ratey, M.D. and Catherine Johnson, Ph.D. This book looks at mild forms of mental deficits such as schizophrenia, hypermanic personality, autism, ADD, OCD and anxiety. They are mild in the sense that these people are functioning in society, but they or others see their behaviour as somewhat odd. I feel it is very useful to have some knowledge of these milder forms of mental disorders so we are not trying to use Jung-Myers theory to explain some unusual behaviour, and also to know when most of us are out of our depth and a client needs to be referred to other professionals. However, at some point in the future this may all tie together in “some grand theory that explains everything about personality.”

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