“I’m an introvert…I love being by myself, love being outdoors, love taking a long walk with my dogs and looking at the trees,flowers,the sky.” — Audrey Hepburn
We’ve had no consensus in discussions here about introversion. We’re not shy or socially anxious except some of us are. Some of us like people, some of us would prefer to spend time with a book, thank you very much. Some of us fear the telephone, some of us dislike the telephone, some of us don’t mind it. Some of us can behave as extroverts, some don’t bother. And then there’s psychologist Elaine N. Aron’s theory about the Highly Sensitive Person , which seems a bit of an outlier in terms of introversion.
And the whole energy discussion–about how being with people drains us while it energizes extroverts–is compelling, but nobody has really been able to pin down empirically what that means. What is energy, in this context?
Well, a very interesting young thinker, Jennifer O. Grimes, has noticed this too. We’ve already heard Grimes’ energy theory, and we’ve heard from her mentor, Jonathan M. Cheek, at Wellesley.
Grimes has a master’s in interdisciplinary studies, combining philosophy, neuroscience, psychology. She is currently a research assistant at Wellesley and Harvard, and she continues puzzling over introversion.
“There is such a struggle at what is at the core of introversion/extroversion,” Grimes told me in a recent interview. “What we were noticing was a popular movement to bring a little more clarity to the definition, but there’s not been an awful lot of psychometric work with that.”
Grimes is all for the introvert-positive movement, to which this blog belongs. “I like its goal, ” she says. “But I’m not sure I like so much how it pulls it off, because some of the literature reads like an idiosyncratic account of a personal experience.”
Grimes, Cheek, and researcher Julie K. Norem (who also has done wonderful research into pessimism ) started trying to tease apart all the various definitions we see of introversion. They did a literature review, and examined  existing measurement tools–such as Marti Olsen Laney’s introversion scale . “I did a factor analysis of Laney’s scale,” Grimes says. “It really tests psychometrically as a shyness scale.”
Grimes, Cheek, and Norem developed a four-factor model of introversion, dividing it into Social Introversion (prefers solitude to people); Thinking Introversion (reflective and introspective); Anxious Introversion (shy and ruminative); and Inhibited Introversion (resists new experiences).
That’s interesting enough, but where Grimes went next in her exploration of introversion is compelling, likely to be controversial, and quite possibly right on the money—research (someday) will tell.
In her master’s thesis (read it here ) Grimes posits that introversion is not the opposite of extroversion, but that they are two different traits altogether. And she proposes something that has come up here from time to time: That introversion actually is on the autism scale.
Grimes’ thesis explains that if you take each of the factors this new model proposes and follow it along a continuum to their most extreme expressions, they correlate with the widely used Baron-Cohen Autism Spectrum Quotient.
Depending on how much we have of each factor  (and how they interact with other personality traits), we can be simply introverted or, moving along the continuum, have Asperger’s syndrome or, moving further yet, have autism.
Consider, for example, that many of us tend to think slowly and are not quick at communicating. At the introvert level, no big deal. Take that communication difficulty and move it along the scale Grimes proposes and you get to Asperger’s and then autism.
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