Posted by NikkiT2 on March 4, 2005, at 12:37:40
In reply to Re: Asperger's, posted by allisonm on March 4, 2005, at 9:09:50
I can't find a URl for the article for the life of me.. its like it never existed!! But I did find a copy of it I sent to someone in email..
February 07, 2005Children who can love too much
Anjana Ahuja
Is your child a systemiser or an empathiser? A researcher into autism is trying to identify the differenceTHEY COULD be called the “cocktail party” kids. They have exceptional social antennae, can detect and respond to the faintest flicker of a facial expression, and are natural empathisers.
But ask them to perform an arithmetical exercise, solve a 3-D puzzle or navigate in a strange location and the picture changes. Anxiety sets in; they lose interest or seem unable to cope.
The cocktail party kids are the mirror images of autistic children, who falter in social situations but are much happier dealing with — sometimes obsessively — numbers, trains, gadgets and other machines. But while autism has long been recognised, its mirror image has not. Indeed, it may exist only in the imagination of Simon Baron-Cohen from Cambridge University, the country’s leading autism — researcher, who has developed a theory of autism that predicts the existence of excessively empathic children. Now he is launching an online study that will be a major test of his theory. If he is right, the Mother and Child project, a study which he hopes thousands of mothers will join online, should uncover a group of children who are highly empathic but who fare less well at technical, spatial and mathematical challenges.
This line of research is so new that he doesn’t know how such children will behave socially; they may well turn out not to be confident social butterflies. “This is new and speculative research and until we meet them it’s hard to predict how they will behave,” says Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology and director of the university’s Autism Research Centre.
“Instead of flitting easily from conversation to conversation, they might be so tuned in to other people’s feelings that they can’t detach, and they might instead feel very troubled. All we know about them is that they should be super-empathisers.”
His somewhat controversial thesis on autism — based on the observation that boys largely prefer machines to people while girls favour the opposite — is that the condition is sex-linked and is, in fact, the male brain writ large. He takes his cue from the fact that autism is much more prevalent among boys than girls.
He says that in normal development the brain develops the capacity to empathise and to “systemise”. The first capability oils the cogs of social relationships and allows us, for example, to pick up when someone is happy, sad, disappointed or frightened. The second ability, to systemise, affords us a more technical understanding of the world. This is the skill required for, among other things, doing mathematics, reading maps and taking apart car engines.
In autism, Baron-Cohen suggests, the systemising part of the brain develops at the expense of the empathising part. So, according to the questionnaires Baron-Cohen has developed, people with autism have a high systemising quotient (SQ) but a low empathy quotient (EQ). However, autism varies in its severity, suggesting that it lies on a continuum and, he says, “there is no reason to rule out the existence of people at the other end of the dimension.” These would be people with low S scores but high E scores, the “super-empathisers”. Those with similar EQ and SQ are called Type Bs, meaning they are “balanced”. There are others whose bias towards systemising or empathising is more moderate — they are labelled, respectively, Type S and Type E.
While parents of an autistic child may know early on that something is amiss, would the parents of a super-empathiser be similarly aware? He thinks so. “When my nine-year-old son got a new computer game for Christmas and was trying to load it, he got out the computer manual and went through it step by step. It was a very systematic approach. Some kids wouldn’t do it that way. I think parents would be able to tell if they have children who follow instructions very carefully or whether they have a more idiosyncratic approach and quickly lose interest.”
Only by meeting the super-empathisers will Baron-Cohen be able to find out whether the mirror image of autism leads to problems or difficulties. It would also interest him to find out whether the super-empathisers colonise certain professions in the same way that people with autism are over-represented in such fields as engineering, computer science and mathematics. It is plausible, he says, that highly empathic individuals prefer people-focused occupations such as counselling, human resources and social work.
Encouragingly, in a recent survey of more than 250 people BaronCohen’s team discovered a small group — all women — of super-empathisers. They are being invited in for further testing and, if the data is validated, it will be a significant victory for his theory, which he detailed in a recent book, The Essential Difference. The book, which described autism as an “extreme male brain” (and in which the super-empathisers have an extreme female brain), drew criticism for promoting gender stereotypes but Baron-Cohen feels it has been misunderstood: “There is lots of evidence that the sexes do differ but I explain that when it comes to an individual, we cannot predict anything on the basis of sex alone. You can get very good female computer programmers and very empathic men. If anything, the data work against stereotyping.”
The connection with gender has led Baron-Cohen to explore whether autism is linked to hormones. In particular, he is investigating whether the level of testosterone to which children are exposed in the womb predisposes them to a greater risk of autism. Ingeniously, he has been tracking the development of around 100 healthy children whose mothers underwent amniocentesis during pregnancy. The amniotic fluid — frozen and stored after testing — is imprinted with the testosterone produced by the foetus. After gaining consent from the mothers for this new study, BaronCohen’s team saw the children at 12 months, 18 months and four years. Even at 12 months, the level of eye contact varies.
“Just on that test, there is a sex difference. We find that little girls look more at faces than little boys. But even if you look within one sex, you find a correlation with testosterone.” At four years of age, the link between behaviour and foetal testosterone persisted, with the high-testosterone children having more difficulties socialising and displaying a narrower range of interests. The mums’ study asks mothers about their hormone profile, and allows them to gauge the EQ and SQ of their children.
The Cambridge researchers have also set up a separate online study to investigate the interplay between hormones and behaviour in people who are not necessarily parents. Anyone can participate, and Baron-Cohen hopes that interest will be stirred among those with hormonal conditions such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia (which leads to an overproduction of male hormones) and androgen insensitivity syndrome (in which genetic XY males have completely or partially female genitalia but male reproductive organs internally).
It is possible that super-empathisers do not come to our attention because it is more socially acceptable to be a poor systemiser than a poor empathiser. Baron-Cohen wishes that those with autism, who find it difficult to read others’ emotions, were accorded the same understanding as those who cannot fix their computers: “There are places to go to if you have a systemising problem — you can phone up IT support or take your car to get it fixed, but if you have a problem with empathy, society doesn’t cater for you.”
poster:NikkiT2
thread:465914
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/2000/20041213/msgs/466459.html