The relationship between "Eating" and "Mind" revealed by episodic narrative

～Understanding a world where people want to eat but can't～

Abstract

　Problems related to the unbalanced diet of children with autism spectrum disorder have been analyzed from the characteristics of the disorder and studied on how to deal with it. However, the problem of not being able to eat is not just the fact, but also a complex combination of factors, such as the various situations and emotions that arise for the person, family, and other people who live with them. So in this paper, I want to highlight toddlers with autism spectrum disorder, their families, and their supporters to understand the meaning of a world where people want to eat but can't. Episodic narrative was used as a method to achieve this. Episodic narrative refers to a narrative in which the narrator reconstructs facts that occur in the actual scene and outputs them as an expression that includes the characters' actions, interiors, environments, knowledge and skills. Here, through episodic narrative, I depicted a "story" in which a toddler who wants to eat lunch in kindergarten but can't, through interaction with various people, ends up eating lunch in elementary school. The results suggest the importance of taking into account behavioural psychological findings, such as hypersensitivity of the response to a specific stimulus and how easily it can be reinforced, for problems related to the situation in which a person wants to eat but is unable to do so. However, the narrative also depicted the relationships within the context of their lives and the internal world of each individual, which cannot be understood by such findings alone. The richness of eating is realized in the context of life.