One common fawning tactic among Autistics is mirroring: lightly mimicking the actions and emotions of another person, trying to meet the energy they are giving off so that they view us as normal and similar to themselves. However, paying close attention to a person’s actions and feelings and then mimicking it as best you can is a very cognitively draining and distracting endeavor. A study by Kulesza and colleagues (2015) found that when experimental study participants were asked to subtly mimic the behavior of a conversation partner, the mimicker actually had a harder time recognizing the
...more
