Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article highlights a basic neurological difference in autistic people. Apparently, we simply don't initiate social actions as much. The article calls this "reduced social motivation" which basically means we're not as likely to put in effort to interact with others. Some people think this is because we don't find it as rewarding as typically-developing people do.
The lack of this motivation would account in part for our lesser social skills. When a child grows up, they run into hundreds of thousands of social situations. Social motivation pushes them to develop their own, and to interact with the ones they find themselves in. With reduced motivation comes reduced opportunities to learn the typically expected behaviors, and observe others' behaviors.
Let's say an autistic child grows up only responding to half the presented social situations, and, not being interested in creating their own, has no further ones. They will then be, at best, half as adept at social situations as a typically developing child. The learning opportunities were missed, so the learning didn't occur. This quickly becomes a disability in a world that expects everyone to react and behave similarly. And this doesn't even factor in other common issues, like sensory sensitivities, gut dysfunctions, and anxiety.
Tellingly to me, though, was that the children that were later given autism diagnoses did still respond properly to initiated joint attention. Our brains are different, but not so different we can't learn or have anything in common with typically developing children. I've heard of early intervention programs that focused on teaching autistic children to pay attention to others, thus kind of overriding this neurological quirk. Establish that valuable information can be had from other people, and the child will then learn to keep an eye on other people for that information. I've not heard what the programs' success rates were like, though.
I think it's safe to say this is one of those observations that was right on target for me as a child. Prior to reading this article, I would have assumed that was a facet of my introversion, not my autism. I guess it could be both. Or the autism lead to the introversion, for me? Not all autistic people are introverts, though, so the two things might be unrelated.
In any case, I was definitely a socially-reaction child, not a proactive one. I was interested in what I was interested in, but I don't think it generally occurred to me to try to share that interest. I'm sure that was in part because my peers, in general, were at best neutral to me. You wouldn't walk into a room of hostile people and expect them to care about your latest favorite song. You'd avoid the room, or tiptoe in quietly if you had to go in, so as not to upset them further. Though I guess some people would also try joking with the people to try to lighten the mood, but I am not one of those people. I just wanted to be left alone.
In the course of trying to be left alone, I had a lot of opportunity to observe people... so I did. Which taught me a lot about people and social systems, though unfortunately from the outsider's perspective. Still, it's that knowledge that has let me be so successful as a bridge between autistic people and neurotypical people.
At this time, I would say that I regularly initiate joint attention, though not as much as my spouse does. He'll sit and browse on his phone and try to show me pictures or stories or whatever every minute or so if we have downtime. I'll only do that if I find something particularly funny or highly related to his interests. Still, I think now I probably fall a lot closer to "normal" in terms of this facet of social communication.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
Today's article highlights a basic neurological difference in autistic people. Apparently, we simply don't initiate social actions as much. The article calls this "reduced social motivation" which basically means we're not as likely to put in effort to interact with others. Some people think this is because we don't find it as rewarding as typically-developing people do.
The lack of this motivation would account in part for our lesser social skills. When a child grows up, they run into hundreds of thousands of social situations. Social motivation pushes them to develop their own, and to interact with the ones they find themselves in. With reduced motivation comes reduced opportunities to learn the typically expected behaviors, and observe others' behaviors.
Let's say an autistic child grows up only responding to half the presented social situations, and, not being interested in creating their own, has no further ones. They will then be, at best, half as adept at social situations as a typically developing child. The learning opportunities were missed, so the learning didn't occur. This quickly becomes a disability in a world that expects everyone to react and behave similarly. And this doesn't even factor in other common issues, like sensory sensitivities, gut dysfunctions, and anxiety.
Tellingly to me, though, was that the children that were later given autism diagnoses did still respond properly to initiated joint attention. Our brains are different, but not so different we can't learn or have anything in common with typically developing children. I've heard of early intervention programs that focused on teaching autistic children to pay attention to others, thus kind of overriding this neurological quirk. Establish that valuable information can be had from other people, and the child will then learn to keep an eye on other people for that information. I've not heard what the programs' success rates were like, though.
I think it's safe to say this is one of those observations that was right on target for me as a child. Prior to reading this article, I would have assumed that was a facet of my introversion, not my autism. I guess it could be both. Or the autism lead to the introversion, for me? Not all autistic people are introverts, though, so the two things might be unrelated.
In any case, I was definitely a socially-reaction child, not a proactive one. I was interested in what I was interested in, but I don't think it generally occurred to me to try to share that interest. I'm sure that was in part because my peers, in general, were at best neutral to me. You wouldn't walk into a room of hostile people and expect them to care about your latest favorite song. You'd avoid the room, or tiptoe in quietly if you had to go in, so as not to upset them further. Though I guess some people would also try joking with the people to try to lighten the mood, but I am not one of those people. I just wanted to be left alone.
In the course of trying to be left alone, I had a lot of opportunity to observe people... so I did. Which taught me a lot about people and social systems, though unfortunately from the outsider's perspective. Still, it's that knowledge that has let me be so successful as a bridge between autistic people and neurotypical people.
At this time, I would say that I regularly initiate joint attention, though not as much as my spouse does. He'll sit and browse on his phone and try to show me pictures or stories or whatever every minute or so if we have downtime. I'll only do that if I find something particularly funny or highly related to his interests. Still, I think now I probably fall a lot closer to "normal" in terms of this facet of social communication.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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