This item is intended to tap the understanding of emotional introspection which is the ability to identify and reflect upon one’s own emotional states. Although there are a variety of ways in which we can know our own minds and bodies, the topic of emotional introspection is devoted to emotional content which interplays with, but is different from, other forms of consciousness including our ability to introspect about our own actions (a.k.a. self-action-monitoring), intentions (self-intention-monitoring), and thoughts and beliefs (a.k.a. self-belief or self-knowledge attribution).
Unlike the other forms of introspection, emotional introspection is considered to be a primary form. Not only are emotional experiences an early evolutionary development but emotional introspection provides a value assessment (e.g., positive, negative) that endows their subjects with motive (e.g., approach, avoid; Seagar, 2002). Compared to other forms of introspection, emotional introspection is also considered more complex owing, in part, to its three-component structure (Gaigg, 2012; Seagar, 2002). As Seagar (2002) argued, every emotional experience consists of some kind of perception (e.g., seeing a bear), a bodily disturbance (e.g., heart begins to race), and an ‘evaluation’ component (a.k.a. ‘appraisal’, e.g., “feeling afraid”). It is this third evaluation component that differentiates emotional from mere perceptual consciousness and which makes emotional introspection more difficult and more prone to error compared to other forms of introspection. This difficulty is compounded when one considers the complexity of the emotion under consideration not to mention our human susceptibility to self-deception. Seagar (2002) illustrates the complexities of the evaluative component of emotional introspection using an example from Jane Austen’s novel “Emma”:
“Persistently unable to acknowledge her love for Mr. Knightly, Emma finds herself somewhat attracted to…Frank Churchill. Emma, whose most characteristic emotional state throughout most of the novel is one of boredom, contrives to imagine that she is in love:
‘this sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of everything’s being dull and insipid about the house! I must be in love…’ (Austen, 1816/1966, p. 266).
This example falls under the [category]…of emotional introspection… Emma is conscious of bodily sensations, and especially the (weakly negative) evaluative assessment of her surroundings (characteristic of boredom or low level depression). She is also well aware of Frank Churchill and the general expectation that he and she ought to be in love. Furthermore, Frank Churchill is undeniably a possible matrimonial match for whom Emma definitely has some feelings of genuine affection. But to know that she is in love with him, Emma has to correctly assess the linkages amongst the components of her emotional state. This is not to say that it is always difficult to know that one is in love, and Emma eventually achieves a more accurate self assessment [when she realizes that she is, in fact, in love with Mr. Knightly]. But it is significant that the vagueness or unclarity in the concept of love infects attempts at introspection about love. In general, mental states which are expressed by ‘difficult’ or complex mental state concepts are harder to instropect than simple or straightforward ones...But of equal significance in a case such as Emma’s is the way that introspective assessment is itself an object of evaluation” [i.e., it is recursive in nature]. (p. 684).
In summary, an evaluation component is central to emotional introspection and emotional experience is a primary, yet complex, element of consciousness that is thoroughly integrated with high level cognition. If the proposed three-part structure of emotional introspection (perceptual, bodily disturbance, evaluation) is correct, one would expect to see disorders in which the functions of these components dissociate. Indeed, several intriguing clinical phenomena, including an inability to experience pain[1] (which is sometimes reported in ASD), natural split-brain experiments[2], and Capgras Syndrome[3] have been offered as evidence for the critical role played by the evaluation component of emotional introspection.
Of course, emotional introspection is not all-or-none and is best construed along a continuum from early, simple, or less developed forms to later, complex, or more developed forms. One determinative factor for the complexity of emotional introspection appears to be the richness of our knowledge about the mind. This is because the evaluative process that is central to emotional introspection is conceptual in nature and thus requires an appropriate field of concepts for its formulation. The notion of individual differences in the complexity of emotion introspection is supported by research citing an association between emotional intelligence[4] and performance on theory of mind tasks (Barlow, Qualter, & Styliano, 2010; Furguson & Austin, 2010; Qualter, Barlow, & Styliano, 2011; Stone, Baron-Cohen, & Knight, 1998). It makes sense that the ability to identify and reflect upon one’s own mental states would be correlated with performance on theory of mind tasks (in which others’ perspectives must be inferred). In fact, an important theoretical question for philosophers and psychologists is whether the same cognitive mechanism required for attributing thoughts and feelings to others is also necessary for attributing these mental states to the self. As Frith and Happé (1999) explained:
“At first glance the two attributions seem entirely different: our own mental states do not have to be inferred through observation like those of others, and they may be less likely to be erroneous. However, even though the input channels by which the relevant information is received may well be different, a crucial part of the process is to distinguish mental states - be they first-person or other people’s - from representations of the physical world…It seems plausible that the mechanism that keeps representations of mental states separate from representations of physical states is the same for self and other attribution. Even if the appreciation of others’ mental state results in representations that are more error prone than the representation of own mental states, this difference becomes trivial if one is unable to represent mental states at all” (pp. 4-5).
In fact, there is very little evidence from the developmental literature[5] to support the common sense notion that we are aware of our own mental states before we are aware of others’ mental states: “when children are able to report their own mental states, they are also able to report the mental states of others. Conversely, when they cannot report and understand the psychological states of others, they do not report those states of themselves” (Frith & Happé, 1999, p. 5). The cognitive structures for representing one’s own and others’ mental states remain a topic of debate but the dominant view seems to be that these are not separate systems (e.g., Carruthers, 2009; Frith & Happé, 1999; Gopnik, 1993; Hobson, 1990; Leslie, 1987; for a contrary view, see Nichols & Stitch, 2003; Westby & Robinson, 2014). Moreover, consistent with a Vygotskian view of cognitive development, it may be that it is actually the ability to make inferences about others’ minds that is most facilitative for introspecting about our own minds using a process in which we “are turning our mindreading capacities on ourselves” (Carruthers, 2009, p. 123).
Because so little data are available that are specific to the construct of emotional introspection, a brief review of the findings for emotional intelligence (a relative of emotional introspection; see footnote 4) is warranted. Emotional intelligence is positively associated with life satisfaction, social network quality, contentiousness, empathy, and social competence and negatively associated with alexithyma[6], psychological distress, neuroticism, loneliness, and depression (e.g., Austin, Evans, Coldwater, & Potter, 2005; Brackett, Rivers, Shiffman, Lerner, & Salovey, 2006; Saklofske, Austin, & Minski, 2003). Interestingly, the ability to focus attention on our past, present, or future subjective experiences (another relative of emotional introspection known as ‘autonoetic’ [i.e., self-knowing] consciousness[7]) is linked to competency with episodic memory (Gardiner, 2001; Wheeler, Stuss, & Tulving, 1997). Episodic memory is a special kind of autobiographical memory in which people consciously remember and ‘relive’ a personally-experienced event (e.g., going back in one’s mind to remember the scene at a birthday party, knowing one’s place in that scene, and recalling the sights or sounds). The empirical links between episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness are theoretically important for understanding the processes involved in emotional introspection and underscore the crucial role played by memory, the ability to form coherent mental representations, and mental-time travel (see our description of item 57: future thinking).
Lane (2006) proposed several developmentally-sequenced levels of emotional awareness that ranged from a mere implicit awareness of physical sensations or bodily disturbances (i.e., somatic symptoms) that are associated with an emotion to a richly endowed explicit awareness of complex emotions. Like most theory of mind competencies, then, emotional introspection appears to undergo key developments in toddlerhood and the preschool years (e.g., use of emotion terms to describe a situation in which the child was happy, sad, mad, or scared). Still, researchers tend to construe the ability to consciously and explicitly reflect upon and analyze one’s own emotional experiences as a late stage or Advanced theory of mind competency that emerges in middle or late childhood (Ferrnyhough, 2015; Westby & Robinson, 2014) and that continues to develop into adulthood.
Emotional Introspection in ASD
Very little research has been conducted on ASD with regard to the specific topic of emotional introspection. For this reason, the pertinent related bodies of literature are briefly reviewed here. As noted above, there are many different ways that one can know and understand one’s self and review of the ASD literature reveals a fascinating portrait of general strength and challenge areas in this regard (for an excellent review, see Williams, 2010):
Intact/superior self-action-monitoring in ASD: Most studies/reviews on this topic conclude that self-action-monitoring (i.e., the ability to distinguish between ‘self-caused’ and ‘world-caused’ changes in experience) are intact in ASD and may even be superior relative to neurotypical samples (Frith & Hermelin, 1969; Williams, 2010; Williams & Happé, 2009a; but see Russell & Hill, 2001; Russell & Jarrod, 1999, for conflicting results).
Impaired self-belief and self-knowledge attribution in ASD: Most studies/reviews on this topic conclude that self-belief and self-knowledge attribution are impaired in ASD and that while children with ASD tend to overestimate their knowledge of both self and others, they tend to have the greater difficulty representing their own beliefs than the beliefs of other people (Perner, Frith, Leslie, & Leekham, 1989; Williams, 2010; Williams & Happé, 2009b; but see Kazak, Collis, & Lewis, 1997 who report null results).
Impaired self-intention-monitoring in ASD: Most studies/reviews on this topic conclude that self-intention-monitoring (the ability to determine whether one’s own action was carried out intentionally) is impaired in ASD (Phillips, Baron-Cohen, & Rutter, 1999; Williams, 2010; Williams & Happé, 2009c; but see Russell & Hill, 2001, for conflicting results). For example, children with ASD are more likely than learning-disabled children to incorrectly report that a knee-jerk reflex was under their intentional control. Impairment in self-intention-monitoring is associated with other impairments in theory of mind: a relation that holds after the effects of age and verbal ability are removed (Lang & Perner, 2002; Williams & Happé, 2009c). “These result support the view that individuals with autism have diminished awareness of their own intentions and that this diminution is directly related to their impairments in recognizing others’ mental states” (Williams, 2010, p. 479).
These patterns of strengths and challenges in self-knowing in ASD “provide strong support for a taxonomy of self-awareness that clearly distinguishes between physical and psychological aspects of self. Developmentally speaking, the case of autism seems also to demonstrate that one can have a diminished awareness of the psychological self without any obvious implications for awareness of the physical self” (Williams, 2010, p. 486). In light of the challenges identified with awareness of the psychological self and the aforementioned complexity inherent in emotional introspection, one should expect difficulty in this area as well. This conclusion is consistent with the finding that individuals with ASD with high language and intellectual abilities score significantly lower than neurotypical individuals on measures of emotional intelligence (see footnote 4; Montgomery, McCrimmon, Schewan, & Saklofske, 2020; Petrides, Hudry, Michalaria, Swami, & Sevdalis, 2011) which, in turn, predicts levels of social dysfunction (Montgomery, Stoesz, & McCrimmon, 2012). It also comports well with the finding that although alexithymia (characterized by difficulties in identifying and communicating one’s own emotions) affects approximately 10% of the general population (Mattila, Salminem, Nummi, & Joukamaa 2006), the prevalence in ASD is estimated to be somewhere between 40 and 65% (Berthoz & Hill, 2005; Hill, Berthoz, & Frith, 2004; Tani et al., 2004).
In both typical development and ASD, it appears that the ability to read others’ minds is strongly associated with the ability to read one’s own (Frith & Happé, 1999; Moriguchi et al., 2006; Williams & Happé, 2010): an observation that has been empirically confirmed in brain imaging studies specifically focusing on the processing of emotional information in ASD (Bird, Silani, Brindley, White, Frith, & Singer, 2010; Silani, Bird, Brindley, Singer, Frith, & Frith, 2008). In short, these abilities tend to rise and fall together but when capacities do diverge in ASD, it tends to be the case that the ability to read others’ minds is better than the ability to read one’s own! [8] (Williams, 2010; Williams & Happé 2009c; Williams, Lind, & Happé, 2009). Although these intriguing results may at first seem out of keeping with the single mechanism view (i.e., the view that there is one mechanism that supports the ability to reason about the mental worlds of self and other; described above), it is elegantly reconciled with that view when one imagines a single mechanism with two routes of access (one for self and one for other). This is important in light of the findings that many individuals with ASD may not appreciate the value of having first-person privileged access to their own inner states (Mitchell & O’Keefe, 2008). Indeed, when recalling experienced events, individuals with ASD are less likely to than neurotypical samples to report taking a first-person perspective and instead report taking a third-person (observer) view (Lind & Bowler, 2010). As Williams (2010) further explained: