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Developmental Psychology > Theories of Autism > Flashcards

Theories of Autism Flashcards

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1
Q

Prevelance of autism

A

1% of the population (700,000 in the UK) are autistic, most are adults, and many remain undiagnosed

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2
Q

Aspergers syndrome vs autism spectrum disorder

A
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder is the official term in DSM-V
  • Aspergers Syndrome (AS) commonly refers to people on the spectrum without language delay or learning disability
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3
Q

What is autism?

A

Clinically defined by a combination of:
- Impairments in social-communication
- Restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour (including sensory processing differences)

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4
Q

What is autism according to the DSM-V?

A
  1. Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, including:
    - Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity
    - Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviours used for social interaction
    - Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understand relationships
  2. Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities
  3. Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period
  4. Symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning.
  5. These disturbances are not better explained by intellectual disability or global developmental delay.
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5
Q

What are the three main cognitive theories of autism?

A
  1. Theory of Mind: failure to acknowledge others have their own thoughts and beliefs
  2. Executive Dysfunction: deficits in inhibition, planning and executive memory
  3. Weak Central Coherence: preference for local details over the global whole or context.
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6
Q

False belief task in autism, Baron-Cohen et al., (1985)

A
  • Sally-Ann task
  • Sally put a ball in a basket and walks away .
  • Ann moved the ball out of the basket
  • Sally didn’t see this
  • Children asked where Sally will look for the ball
  • Found that autistic children will look where Ann put the ball as they haven’t developed ToM.
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7
Q

Inferring mental states if geometric figure Kin (2000)

A
  • Autistic people don’t attribute mental states to people, so they won’t attribute mental states to geometric shapes
  • Autistic child explains the movement of shapes in a non-materialistic way
  • Child without autism explains the movement of shapes attributed to mental states to shapes (e.g. called big square a bully)
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8
Q

Smarties false belief task, Perner et al. (1989)

A
  • child sees smarties tube and assumes smarties inside but it actually has a pencil in it
  • asked autistic child what they think the next child will think is in the tube
  • the autistic child will think they will say pencil
  • can’t take into account someone will think differently despite thinking that way themselves
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9
Q

Contradicting evidence for autism and ToM, Sparrevohn & Howie (1995)

A

found that autistic children with higher mental age more likely to pass ToM tasks

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10
Q

Contradicting evidence for autism and ToM, Happe (1995)

A
  • Relationship between child’s verbal mental age and passing FB tasks
  • Verbal mental age of 12 able to pass compared to 4yrs in typically developing children
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11
Q

1st and 2nd order false belief in autistic children, Baron-Cohen (1989)

A
  • Autistic people pass 1st order, fail 2nd order
  • Proposed that ToM problem was a delay rather than a deficit
  • But Bowler (1992) found that children with Aspergers pass 2nd order
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12
Q

Is children failing ToM tasks unique to autistic children?

A
  • Children with visual impairment showed difficulty with false belief (Minter, Hobson & Bishop, 1998)
  • Children with hearing impairment have development delay in acknowledging false belief (Woolfe, Want & Siegal, 2002)
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13
Q

What is executive control?

A

The ability to maintain an appropriate problem-solving set for the attainment of a future goal; it includes behaviours such as:
- planning
- impulse control
- inhibition of prepotent but irrelevant responses
- set maintenance
- organized search
- flexibility of search and action.

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14
Q

why was the theory of executive control proposed?

A

Proposed to account for social & non-social symptoms (repetitive behaviour)

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15
Q

Do autistic children show executive control, Ozonoff et al, 1991

A
  • Tower of Hanoi:Acted impulsively, could not plan several moves ahead, shifted all loops directly, etc
  • Wisconsin Card Sort:Unable to shift attentional focus, persevered to sort by established system
  • Theory of Mind tests: Many passed 1st orderSome passed 2nd order

ToM tasks not common denominator worst at predicting autistic children performance

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16
Q

Can executive control explain social/communication problems? Russell et al 1991

A
  • window with chocolate inside, task was not to point at the chocolate or they won’t get to have it
  • about resisting pointing
  • autistic children failed this task
  • Perhaps FB task not about lack of insight but more about failure to inhibit
17
Q

Is executive function the primary cause of ASD? Sodian and Frith (1992)

A
  • Children had to lie to a ‘theif’ that their box of treasure wsa locked
  • autistic children could not lie
18
Q

what is weak central coherence?

A
  • attempts to explain social and non social symptoms
  • proposes that autistic people don’t automatically process contextual meaning or use prior knowledge
  • autistic people have a bias towards piecemeal or local (over global) processing
19
Q

Language processing in autistic people, Snowling and Frith, 1986

A
  • Those with autism fail to use context when processing ambiguous homographs. (e.g. The actor took a bow.)
  • literal
  • difficulties with sarcasm and irony
20
Q

Embedded figures test, Shah and Frith (1983)

A
  • autistic people found the shape faster than matched controls
21
Q

Embedded figures test, Pring et al. (1995)

A
  • Individuals with autism were as fast at solving a jigsaw upside-down as right-way-up
22
Q

Visual illusions and autism, Happe (1996)

A
  • some evidence to argue that autistic people are less susceptible to visual illusions
  • but also evidence against
23
Q

social vs medical model of autsim

A

social model - recognises any difficulties a person experiences is not just within the person but also between them and the environment
- poor job prospects
- no ramps
- poorly designed buildings
- inaccessible transport

medical model - places autistc difficulties from inside themselves
- can’t work
- looking for a cure
- need help and careres

24
Q

Diffusion chains (Crompton et al., 2019)

A

Is autistic peer-to-peer information transfer more efficient than mixed autistic – non autistic?
- 3 of each chain, 1 all autistic, 2. non autistic, 3. mixed
- Matched on age, gender, IQ, education, diagnosis (exc. social anxiety)
- Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer more efficient than mixed chain

24
Q

The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012)

A
  • when people with very different experiences of the world interact with eachother, they will struggle to empathise with eachother
  • autistic – autistic interactions more efficient than autistic – non-autistic interactions
25
Q

How are autistic people perceived? Sasson et al (2017)

A
  • “thin slice judgements”
  • 12 autistic and 16 non-autistic adults recorded while interacting with someone
  • Groups matched on age, IQ, gender
  • 36 UG students rated the people from 10 images randomly sampled from the videos
  • Non-autistic people tended to rate autistic people less socially favourably (except for trustworthy + smart)
  • Not due to speech content, but other audio/visual cues
26
Q

How are autistic people perceived? (Sheppard et al., 2019)

A

Non-autistic people find autistic people relatively harder to read

27
Q

How are autistic people perceived? (Alkhaldi et al., 2019)

A

Non-autistic people might rate autistic people negatively because they are hard to read

28
Q

How are autistic people perceived? (Sasson & Morrison, 2019)

A

Disclosing autism diagnosis, and increased autism knowledge increases favourability ratings of autistic people

29
Q

Autistic Traits and Friendship

A
  • DSM-V diagnostic criteria for autism includes deficits in forming stable long-lasting relationships
  • However, the DEP posits that this will only occur when each person has very different views and experiences
  • Will dyads with similar levels of autistic traits report higher friendship quality? YES! (Bolis et al. 2021)
30
Q

Enactive Mind intervention approach Klin (2000)

A
  • social information might be less salient to autistic children which a knock-on effect on development
  • Perhaps providing learning opportunities to autistic children early on in development could improve social and communication skills
31
Q

The Transporters, Golan et al (2010)

A
  • Video of trains with real emotion faces
  • Acted out social situations
    Predictable
    Uses interests
    Can be used by all autistic children
  • N=20 autistic children (4-7 years) watched everyday for 4 weeks
  • Emotion vocabulary and recognition compared pre/post intervention
  • Compared to no-intervention group (18 autistic and 18 non-autistic children) matched on age and IQ
  • Children were asked to match the correct emotion face to the situation
  • Used both emotions from the DVD, and new faces/contexts
  • Autistic children in the intervention group significantly improved across all measures
  • Whereas the control groups did not improve/change
31
Q

Thomas the tank engine vs the transporters, Young & Poselt (2012)

A
  • 13 autistic children watched the transporters for 3 weeks, and compared to 12 autistic children who watched Thomas the Tank Engine
  • Autistic children who watched the transporters improved more in emotion recognition than children who watched Thomas
32
Q

what is applied behaviour analysis?

A
  • Intensive early intervention for autistic children
  • Originally developed by Lovaas in 1987
  • Follows behaviourist approaches using positive reinforcement to teach new skills and also repress “challenging behaviours”
  • Followed for years on 1-2-1 basis for 20-50 hours/week
  • Widely used, but is it effective, acceptable, useful to autistic people over the long term?
33
Q

Systematic review and meta-analysis showed limited evidence in support of ABA (Rodgers et al. 2020)

A
  • 20 studies included, but all were biased/poor quality
  • Long term impact of the early interventions beyond 2 years was unknown
  • Wide range of effect sizes
  • Some evidence for positive effects on cognitive ability and adaptive behaviour (life skills, social and communication skills)
  • Testimony of autistic adults who experienced ABA as children about potential harms not captured in research (McGill & Robinson, 2020)
  • Kapp et al. 2019: Suppressing stimming removes a self-regulatory mechanism > feelings of not being accepted
34
Q

Autism acceptance training

A
  • 238 non-autistic adults completed: autism acceptance training, general mental health training not mentioning autism
    no-training control
  • Survey assessed: Explicit autism knowledge, stigma, and impressions of autistic adults
    implicit association task about autism
  • Non-autistic adults in the autism acceptance training condition reported: more positive impressions of autistic adults, fewer misconceptions and lower stigma about autism
    endorsed higher expectations of autistic abilities expressed greater social interest in hypothetical and real autistic people
  • No effect on implicit biases:
    non-autistic adults associating autism-related labels with unpleasant personal attributes regardless of training condition

Developmental Psychology (10 decks)

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