Asperger Syndrome: Traits and Outcomes

Asperger Syndrome, commonly abbreviated AS, is a somewhat controversial and not entirely well understood pervasive developmental disorder. This is perhaps largely because of its relatively recent discovery. Hans Asperger, for whom it is named, published his research in 1944, where he called it autistic psychopathy, though this name fell out of favor due to association of the term psychopathy with the unrelated antisocial personality disorder. (Wing, 1981) It is considered to be related to, or a high-functioning form of, autism.(Bellini & Hopf, 2007) The current name was coined in 1981 (Wing, 1981) and it only gained official recognition as of the DSM-IV in 1994, meaning most diagnosed individuals are older than the diagnosis. It is also quite rare, affecting only about .03% of the population (Fombonne, 2005), though this number is somewhat disputable due to a lack of comprehensive study and the vagueness of some of the diagnostic criteria (Brasic, 2006). In contrast, depression has been known for thousands of years and schizophrenia for well over one hundred (Oltmanns & Emery) and affect a larger percentage of the population, so there is much more research to draw on.

The diagnosis is controversial largely because of disagreement on whether it is a pathology at all. Hans Asperger considered the children he worked with to be quite intelligent and according to Treffert (2004), approximately 80% of people diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome have normal or higher intelligence. Many have led successful lives. In this paper I will examine the causes, the experience of an affected individual and his likely outcomes. I use the male pronoun to refer to both for convenience and due to the fact that males are diagnosed four (Brasic, 2006) to six (Treffert, 2004) times as often as females.

According to the DSM-IV, AS is characterized by six features: Impairment of social interaction, narrow, stereotyped and repetitive interests and behaviors, significant impairment in important functional areas, no delay in language acquisition and the symptoms must not be better explained as another pervasive developmental disorder or schizophrenia.

Social Interaction impairments work both directions. That is, an affected individual will have difficulties both in relating to others and making others relate to him. Brasic (2006) attributes this to a lack of a proper theory of mind, which is the ability which is the ability to recognize the thoughts of others and hypothesize how they will behave in given situations. This is normally developed before school age, but never seems to develop at all in individuals with AS. This may include difficulties with tasks such as understanding that others do not possess the same knowledge they do.

Children will have difficulty forming normal friendships and may be rejected by their peers. This is caused by socially inappropriate attempts to initiate social interaction, lack of understanding of social cues. For instance, they may be perceived as arrogant for failing to look turn and face or otherwise make eye contact with people addressing them, while they might not see any reason to do this as it is more productive to continue looking at whatever they are doing as they can hear the person just fine and aren't any good at understanding the nonverbal cues one gains by looking at a speaker anyway. They also make very limited use of body language and facial expressions. Affected individuals may be confused and hurt by the rejection as they frequently do not understand what they have done wrong and such things are rarely explained as there is an assumption that people understand such things intuitively, though people with AS do not. Myles et al. (2004) have tied this to the “hidden curriculum” concept, which argues that school teaches not just the information you are explicitly given, but a variety of cultural norms one is supposed to infer from context. AS social behaviors could perhaps be accurately summarized as difficulty making proper inferences and effective implications in social contexts.

Some individuals are able to compensate by memorizing what are essentially complex algorithms for proper behavior in a variety of contexts,either by working them out on their own, or by using specialized resources designed to help people with similar difficulties. This approach is, in fact, advocated by many researchers such as Myers et al. (2004) and by Hans Asperger (Treffert, 2004).

This may explain the anxiety those with AS frequently when featuring unfamiliar situations. While they frequently, though not necessarily show normal levels of affection with immediate their immediate family, social interactions outside this context are awkward. Higher-than-usual levels of distress are common in new social situations such as moving, their parents becoming divorced and rejection in dating. Essentially, they see themselves as being placed in a high-stakes game where they do not know the rules and breakdown of their structures, such as being dumped by a significant other or fired can be seen as a personal failure to learn these things. Individuals with autism are at an increased risk for major depression because of this.

The narrow, obsessive interests of those affected with AS are one of the more striking characteristics of the syndrome. A deep interest in a particular subject couple with a general disinterest in most other topics is a common feature. Researchers have observed that the areas of interests, while they vary widely from person to person, tend to be more mechanical and physical than social and limited to one or two at a time, though they may change over time. (Fombonne, 2005) Hans Asperger described the children that were the subject of his original research as “little professors.” This was present in about three-quarters of one sample group. (Wing, 1981) People with AS tend to have very good rote memorization skills and their interests tend to revolve around subjects where this is useful (Treffert, 2004), essentially acting as vast repositories of trivia. They enjoy speaking about their favored subject at length even if the person they are speaking to is not interested. (Wing, 1981) This is presumably related to their social difficulties as they are unable to pick up on cues that the listener does not wish to continue or they may have never considered this possibility due to generally low levels of empathy which lead them to essentially assume others have the same interests they do.

Common interests included various physical sciences, both political and natural history, the arts, but generally not fiction except for fantastic fiction, and things that seem fairly arbitrary, such as bus schedules. (Wing, 1981) According to Bauer, public transportation is a particularly frequent obsession as is collection of assorted