THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYthe characteristics of autism in mild form, but without any speech- or
language-delay and who have normal or above-average IQ, are usually
diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.
Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at the
University of Cambridge, has defined autism according to two traits:
empathizing and systematizing. People with autism tend to score very
poorly on tests of empathizing – for example, they find it difficult to tell a
person’s emotions from their facial expression, especially their eyes, and
they struggle to imagine being in another person’s shoes. By contrast, they
score strongly on systematizing. This is the ability to break a system down
so as to understand the rules governing the way the parts work together.
So, to resort to stereotypes, a typical person with autism probably wouldn’t
make an ideal therapist, but they might excel at engineering.
This idea that people with autism are particularly attentive to detail
has been explained by the Weak Central Coherence Theory, proposed by
Professor Uta Frith in the 1980s. Frith suggested that underlying many
of the outward manifestations of autism is a perceptual bias towards
detail, paired with a deficit for the bigger picture. More recently, the
theory has been refined, and the current view is that autism might be
more accurately described as a deficit when switching from processing
at the local level to processing at the bigger-picture level. Frith’s work
has also shown that while people with autism struggle to understand
other people’s perspectives, they do have sound morals and, in contrast
to psychopaths, are moved by other people’s emotions.
Autism is around four times more common in men than women, a
fact that underlies another recent theory which sees the condition as an
“extreme” form of the male brain. According to Baron-Cohen, in surveys
men tend to score more highly on systematizing, while women tend to
score higher on empathizing. For example, the former are more likely to
agree with statements like “I have my clothes organized carefully according
to type”, while the latter are more likely to agree with statements like “I
prefer to speak to people in person rather than emailing”. Consistent
with the extreme male-brain theory, a 2009 study led by Baron-Cohen
found that the more testosterone there is in the womb during pregnancy,
the more likely a child is to show autistic-like traits when they’re older,
between the ages of six and ten.
Understandably, the small minority of people with autism who also
have exceptional “savant” talents tend to generate a lot of interest.
Two of the most famous are Temple Grandin and Stephen Wiltshire.
Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University,