W9 - Autism ✅ Flashcards
What is meant by neurodiversity?
refers to the variability of human nervous systems
What is the medical model of disability?
- Focus on impairment as the cause of being unable to access goods/services or participate in society
- Focuses on services to ‘fix’ their ‘problems’
- Over-focusing on what the person cannot do instead of what they can do.
What are the features of the Social model of disability?
- Preferred model
- Created by disabled people
- Differentiates between impairment and disability
- Do not ‘have’ a disability but a disability is experienced
- Seeks to remove barriers to allow disabled people to participate in society
- Autism is a different ‘way-of-being’
What is the benefit in collaborations with the Autistic Community?
- Acceptance of Autistic people
- Research co-designed by autistic people has more impact (more validity)
- Reducing stigma by using preferred terms and avoid ableist language
What is the diagnostic criteria for Autism?
Symptoms:
- Persistent difficulties in social communication and interaction
- Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities
- Hyper- or hypo-sensitivity
- Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period
HOW to diagnose?
- standardized diagnostic interviews with person and/or caregivers
- observation of person in various settings (home, school, clinic)
Impact:
- symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning
- co-occuring diagnoses are common (e.g. ADHD, anxiety, depression)
What is the underlying biological mechanisms of autism
Brain scans:
- Smaller subcortical volumes of the pallidum, putamen, amygdala and NAC
- Increased cortical thickness in the frontal cortex and decreased thickness in the temporal cortex
- No age-specific differences found
Genetics:
- Significant rate of autism between monozygotic twins (60%) compared to dizygotic twins (5%)
- Broader autism phenotype between siblings
Interactions between the environment and biological factors (genes, brain systems, cognition and behaviour)
What are the possible explanations for sex/gender difference between autistic people?
Estimate ratio of autistic males to females is 3:1
- Genetic difference:
- sex chromosome, hormones
- amount of rare copy number variants (CNVs) - Underdiagnosis of autistic women and girls
- different set of symptoms and behaviours for autistic females
- autism being considered a “boy” disorder - Camouflaging: higher level of camouflaging seen in autistic females -> affect misdiagnosis
What is meant by camouflaging & coping strategies?
Pressure to ‘fit in’ with neurotypical social communication
Three subscales:
- Masking: hide autistic characteristics
- Compensation: actively compensate for difficulties in social situations
- Assimilation: trying to fit in with others in social situations
What are the criteria for a universal autism theory?
The universal theory must be:
1. Specific to ALL autistic people
2. Sensitive/universal to ALL behavioural features of autism
- difference in communication
- specific behaviours
- areas of interests
Attempt to explain/establish causal relationship to autism development
Limitations of creating a universal theory for autism?
- Compared characteristics against “normative standards” by standardised tests
- Narrow sample (WEIRD, university students, without co-occurring diagnoses)
- Often not informed by the autistic community
What are the factors that contribute to difference in social communication in autistic people?
- Emotion recognition (Alexithymia)
- Cognitive empathy: tested using the Theory of Mind
- Communication: tested using Double Empathy problem
Are there difference in emotion recognition in autistic people?
- No significant difference in brain activation for facial recognition
- There is a sub-group of autistic people that perform worse in facial expression recognition
- Higher levels of alexithymia (inability to aware and identify one’s feeling) in autistic people
=> increase in anxiety symptoms and clinical social features that cause difficulty in social processing in autistic people
Are there any difference in cognitive empathy in autistic people? (Theory of Mind)
No group difference in brain regions activation between non-autistic and autistic participants
Two possible reasons:
- Differences in current autistic feature profiles
- Earlier findings obtained samples that were smaller, more homogeneous, and had potentially different feature profiles
Difference in peer-to-peer transfer of information?
- Difficulty in autistic communication are apparent only when interacting with non-autistic people and are alleviated when interacting with autistic people.
- Selective difficulties occur when autistic and non-autistic people are sharing information
- Significantly lower rapport within mixed groups