Monotropism quotient assessment and its link to perseveration

[Nervous Rex]

This weekend, my wife saw a video on monotropism. I hadn't heard of it before but the concept is familiar to me. Monotropism is the obsession with a single topic. I've seen a lot of references to special interests on this forum. Monotropism seems more severe than that - almost an inability to think about anything else besides the one topic.

I found this Monotropism Quotient Assessment quiz online: MQ Assessment. I'm not sure if I should add it as an AutismForums resource since it's not a professional assessment - just something one guy whipped up. It does appear to be based on formal studies, though.

Anyway, I got these results:

Monotropism Score: 213 / 235
Your Average: 4.53
This score suggests that you are more Monotropic than about 87% of autistic people and about 99% of allistic people based on data from the initial validation study.

The most interesting part for me was that a lot of the questions touched on the behavior of constantly looping back to past incidents or mistakes and reliving or over-analysing them. I've seen that called "perseveration" on this forum.

I always thought that my tendency to overanalyse social situations came from my lack of understanding of social rules - that I have to study incidents in great detail to try to understand them, that I relive mistakes so I don't repeat them.

But this quiz suggests a strong linke between perseveration and monotropism. It seems like positive monotropism is a special interest and negative monotropism is perseveration.

I'm still processing this and trying to get my head around it. Does this make sense to you? Or do you have other ideas?

 

[Neonatal RRT]

Too much of anything probably isn't good. All things in moderation.

Perseveration...rumination...whatever, is not good for the mental health...frankly, studies have demonstrated that it worsens mental health. Of course, all things in moderation, there is something to be said for reviewing and analyzing, coming to a reasonable conclusion...and you gain some wisdom.

 

[Outdated]

I attended a 4 day seminar at the beginning of the year and I got to meet Dr Wenn Lawson, he's the man that came up with the theory of monotropism and is probably one of the leading experts on the topic.

Here's his website:

Monotropism