Lost in translation? Autism and the interest-based social communication style
- Ásdís Bergþórsdóttir
- Jun 2
- 7 min read
Autistic people are often said to lack social skills and have deficits in pragmatic language, leading them to misunderstand non-autistic people. Recent research points to a more complicated picture: the double empathy problem. The double empathy problem is a concept that people of different neurotypes struggle to empathise with each other. It suggests that it's not just autistic people who struggle to understand non-autistic people but also the other way around (Milton, Gurbuz & López 2022). Research has supported this and shown that autistic people understand other autistic people equally well as non-autistic people understand each other (Aiston, Koteyko & van Driel, 2025).
Many now believe that autistic people have a different communication style from non-autistic people. This different communication style probably results from monotropism, a thinking style that involves hyperfocusing on one important task or topic to the speaker. Rosqvist (2019) proposes that autistic communication is based on interests. The autistic communication style is called interest-based sociality. In contrast, the non-autistic communication style is called socially based sociality, based on phatic communion, a form of communication that serves a social function rather than conveying information, meant to establish bonds between people (Aiston, Koteyko & van Driel, 2025).
As a clinical psychologist raised in an autistic family, I find it beneficial to approach my work with the understanding that autistic individuals use language differently than non-autistic individuals. I often assume that my autistic clients are not necessarily trying to establish rapport. Instead, they are describing their world and reality in the hope that the listener will find something in common with them and respond, forming a mutual understanding.
The reality autistic people describe is both an inner and outer world, with emotions and feelings often expressed through special interests. For instance, the speaker might say: “I haven't been able to draw for two weeks”. The speaker is describing the effects of depression, anxiety or stress. They don't name the emotion because, in their world, the cause is insignificant. The problem is that they can't draw and, therefore, have lost their greatest source of enjoyment. In other words, the problem that they see is not depression, anxiety or stress but the loss of the great enjoyment drawing brings. It is a different view from the traditional view, “I am so depressed I can't find any enjoyment in life”, but it is still a valid view. One view looks at the cause, and the other at the consequence.
Mental health professionals claim autistic people who go on about their interests should be stopped and made to focus on their mental health issues. There is a problem with this approach as this means that the autistic person should describe and focus on the part of their life that they generally don't think about and, therefore, are not well prepared to explain to others. For some autistic people, it can be easier to approach mental health problems from their special interests. An example of this [details changed because of confidentiality] is a young client who constantly talked about video games and TikTok videos. During one of the sessions, he mentioned that a particular TikTok star had brain cancer, just like his mother. Of course, his mother did not have brain cancer. The client had mild learning difficulties, and his mother was going through a difficult time. She had explained to him that she had bad things in her mind. He had misunderstood her, thought she was telling him she had cancer and was worried she might die. No one could work out this misunderstanding, as he could only explain his worries through his special interest and favourite TikTok star.
Many of the perceived pragmatic difficulties in autism may simply result from using language differently. For instance, autistic people often get criticised for not greeting others. Greetings are an element of phasic language, and the primary function of greetings such as “hi” is to establish communication. “Hi” only means “I want to establish communication with you. Are you willing to communicate with me?” Autistic people frequently don't use language in this phatic way, but they do not mean to be rude or unfriendly.
When the primary use of language is descriptive, asking questions is not essential. Autistic people ask few questions (Verschuur et al., 2017). A lack of questions is not necessarily a lack of interest, as can be seen from the fact that autistic clients seeking mental health often ask few questions or none. At the same time, they have exhaustively googled the symptomology of a medical condition and the available pharmaceutical options. To me, it seems that autistic people use questions in a different way than non-autistic people. Their primary use of questions is to get important information from somebody, in contrast to the use of questions as a part of back-and-forth questioning in phasic communication. An example of this difference is the question: “Why did you do that?” If an autistic person asks this question, the most common reason is to obtain information; they simply want to know why the other person acted a certain way. For a non-autistic person, however, this is a way to show disapproval of what the listener has done. Such a different use of questions can cause a lot of misunderstanding between autistic and non-autistic people.
Lying is also counterproductive in interest-based sociality. People lie to affect how somebody behaves or appears more favourably. When you want to explain to somebody how you see your world, it makes no sense to lie about how you view it. Autistic people frequently complain that non-autistic people believe they have an ulterior motive when they state what they believe to be true for themselves. This complaint extends to mental services, and people working in mental health must realise the damage of attributing ulterior motives to autistic people. It creates misunderstandings and breaks down a therapeutic relationship.
Another common misunderstanding between people using different communication styles is when an autistic person describes their special interests, and a non-autistic person will politely nod and say they share their special interests without having genuine interest; this is meant as a polite way of establishing rapport. Unfortunately, the non-autistic person lacks in-depth knowledge and will be found out by the autistic person, who can interpret the politeness as a lie and believe that the non-autistic person is somehow trying to deceive them.
Autistic people frequently complain that non-autistic people believe they have an ulterior motive when they state what they believe to be true for themselves.
When language is literal, facial expressions are not essential in distinguishing meaning in what is being said. The sentence “Pokemons are great fun” can have a completely different meaning if someone rolls their eyes or smiles. However, if the language is literal and the sentence “Pokemons are great fun” can only have one literal meaning, the facial expressions accompanying the sentence are irrelevant. One of the features of autism is a lack of facial expressions, which poses a problem as mental health training involves training to value suicidality and depression from expressions as well as what is said. A mental health worker might, thus, evaluate a person who describes feeling depressed and smiles all the time to be less depressed than someone who has a serious expression. In the case of autistic people, it is more useful to focus solely on verbal expressions than try to interpret verbal expressions from facial expressions. The problem is further exacerbated as some autistic people have trained themselves to smile in social situations and do so always, even describing how difficult their lives are.
One of the difficulties in understanding autistic people is that many are visual thinkers and often see emotions more as a clip of film rather than thoughts and bodily sensations. For instance, when angry, some autistic people will describe in vivid detail what they want to do to the person they are angry at. These descriptions can be extremely violent. Yet, they are not a description of what they plan to do. It is just the film they see in their mind that represents their anger. When they describe the tearing off people's heads, it becomes evident that what they are describing is not real. For mental health professionals, it can be difficult to distinguish between these expressions of anger and real threat.
The problem of suicidal ideation is similar. Autistic people are more likely to have suicidal ideation than non-autistic people. My view is that this is not only because of higher suicide and depression rates. Autistic visualisation of their depression and despair often involves seeing themselves commit suicide.
For many autistic people, their visualisation of violence and suicide worries them. Social norms have taught them that such a vivid representation is a dangerous one and that they might commit a violent crime or suicide even though they don't want to. The problem for mental health professionals is to distinguish between the visualisation of emotions and intent, which can be a challenging task. Unfortunately, mental health professionals often conclude that these visualisations of depression are threats. The autistic patients, then, feel as if no one is listening to them, which increases the depression, thus making the visualisations more vivid and causing a vicious spiral.
Of course, many autistic people will learn to use language in a non-autist way, leaning towards phatic language. However, for most, phatic language use is a second language, and they are not truly bilingual. Under stress they will revert to their first language, the interest-based social communication style. It is obvious that autistic people seeking mental services are under stress, so it is crucial for people working within mental services to understand that autistic people use language differently than non-autistic people and try to accommodate different language use and even practise interest-based social communication styles to become somewhat proficient in it. It can help to prevent misunderstandings. □
References
Koteyko, N., Aiston, J., & Van Driel, M. (2025). Discourse-based approaches to autistic focused interests: understanding shared focus, mutual accommodation, and multimodal expression. Applied Linguistics.
Milton, D., Gurbuz, E., & López, B. (2022). The 'double empathy problem': Ten years on. Autism, 26(8), 1901-1903.
Rosqvist, H. B. (2019). Doing things together: Exploring meanings of different forms of sociality among autistic people in an autistic work space. Alter, 13(3), 168-178.
Verschuur, R., Huskens, B., Verhoeven, L., & Didden, R. (2017). Increasing opportunities for question-asking in school-aged children with autism spectrum disorder: Effectiveness of staff training in pivotal response treatment. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47, 490-505.
