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FACT-BASED AUTISM INFORMATION: Psychosocial Developmental Domain
This domain includes the growth, change, stability and diversity of human emotions and affect, life span personality traits, self and social awareness and identity, and the ability to create and maintain positive relationships with others.
The biological and cognitive/communication features of Autism can often be seen as culminating in how children with Autism may fail to develop typical social knowledge, awareness, skills and abilities age appropriately. It is also apparent in how even fully cognitively intact functionally verbal adults with mild Autism and Aspergers will still tend to have idiosyncratic social relationship styles and atypical cultural perspectives, even with explicit skills training and a concerted effort to learn. Individuals with Autism often do not develop a deeper awareness or personal understanding of our own thoughts and feelings. We are usually less able to share in a mutual awareness and so a typical understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others. This more egocentric perspective of even mature adults and a notable lack of autonomous self-reflecting and more insightful social relating and automatically responsive empathic capacities are all the most striking and universal aspect of this complex developmental disorder across the full spectrum and life span presentation and experience of this condition. Research has shown that these atypical psychosocial features are the most stable characteristic of this condition, and therefore, the least likely to be remediable over our life spans. Yet, while the social atypicality and often serious psychosocial losses of this group exists on a wide spectrum of severity, most people with Autism, across the full spectrum, are often placed in typically-centered social settings that may highlight, or even exacerbate, social difficulties which will predict mutual behavioral problems between people with Autism and our families, providers and colleagues. However, with accurate assessment and mutual social skills training those of us with Autism all along the Autism spectrum have proven that we can develop the important social relationships we may need and want across home, school and community. With appropriate Autism-specific educational, rather that psychotherapuetic interventions which use explicit self-awareness work, social reasoning skills practice and social setting rehearsals, people with Autism can learn how to cope with and compensate for these characteristic social development gaps. In the process they will often cause typical family members and providers to sharpen up our own self awareness levels, empathic capacities and social skills too.
The complexity of the social aspects of this biological disorder is revealed in the notable lack of first accurate and later significant research into the psychosocial nature of the disorder across the full spectrum. Instead children with more severe forms of the condition are not included in studies, and people on the mild end of the spectrum are often misidentified as having psychodynamic illnesses, or misunderstood as having volitional conduct disorders . This is because early researchers in clinical and social psychology often relied on self-report and cooperative social interaction to define and treat psychosocial problems. But more recent research into the biological nature of social-cognition has now opened new windows of scientific understanding of the psychosocial aspects of Autism. The brains of most people with Autism show significant differences and/or damage in the structure and function of the specific areas responsible for the subjective processing of social information. For example, often facial expressions and gestures are processed via the same cognitive routes as objects, so they then lack social meaning. In addition, the abstract levels of verbal reasoning and the emotional processing needed for self-reflection and social-perspective taking, and the complex social knowledge and problem-solving abilities necessary for mature social reasoning and relatedness may not be present in people with Autism. Therefore, OUR typical adult providers' psychosocial maturity can help people with Autism develop and mature.
However, it is also the lack of awareness and acceptance of diversity in our “social” culture that compounds our groups’ social problems. The expression of our social beingness may be very different from those of us with more typical psychosocial development--but all the same, it does exist in those of us with Autism--just in its own way. Because just like typical children and adults, most people with Autism still have feelings, demonstrate innate personality traits and acquire both asocial and social needs and wants as we all develop. But when the psychosocial diversity and disabilities of people with Autism are considered in combination with our biosocial status and cognitive/communication issues, one can see why typical providers say people with Autism have a pervasive developmental disorder. (But those of us with Autism might say that typical people who are still unwilling to socially adjust and include our needs have one too!)
A.D.A.P.T.™ Training Series. Copyright © 2000-03 by Sharone Lee. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. All names, concepts, methods, materials, products and publications are protected by trademark and copyright, and no part of this text or this web page may be reproduced or distributed in any manner, for any purpose, including educational purposes, without express written consent from: THRESHOLD • SALEM, OREGON • 503-375-9462 • sharone@understandingautism.org. Portions originally published in the 1999 Fall Issue and 2002 Complimentary Edition of The Net Journal of the Autism Society of Oregon, with the Author's permission. |
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