Psychology

About six weeks ago I wrote the following post on Rapid Prompting Method (edited for this current piece); it garnered a lot of attention from avid parent supporters and from the inventor of the method herself. There was a fair amount of conjecture that RPM was cheap as far as autism therapies went, and that parents should leave no stone unturn. One of the last comments left was a suggestion that I bring my oldest to Austin to try the method; I just might be surprised. One of the things that has continued to be of surprise is just how fervently followers of various dubious treatment…

“The false and exaggerated claims associated with facilitated communication have been exposed.” (Miles and Simpson, 1996) Facilitated communication is an issue of contention in some areas of the autism community.  Part of the problem is what is meant by facilitated communication. There is little doubt that most people rely on authorities and various heuristics to ascertain the validity of claims rather than taking the time to investigate the research findings for themselves. Even when individuals are willing to take the time and make the effort to wade through research…

This is sure to be a post that gets various readers' dander up, and I apologize in advance. We have a ways to go in the scientific disciplines towards nondiscriminatory and nonoffensive language. When the scientific literature being produced was only being read by other scientists and practioners, there was probably not the same potential to offend with the use of clinical language. With so many parents and autistic individuals themselves now consumers of the scientific literature, it's important to move towards characterizations that take into account a different audience and work to…

Dr. Raymond Mar, of On Fiction: An Online Magazine on the Psychology of Fiction, published a research bulletin the other day summarizing a psychological study whose results apparently suggest that, in the words of the blog headline, “words reveal the personality of the writers.”  After presenting the background, experimental procedure, and findings, Dr. Mar concludes that “From these findings, it appears that creative writing can indeed reveal aspects of the author’s personality to readers. An encouraging result for those of us who feel we’ve come to know an author by reading his or her…

One of the things that gets bandied about with regular frequency is the proportion of severely impaired individuals on the spectrum and the accompanying rates of ID. I've run across another study that looks at both of these things. Chakrabarti and Fombonne (2001) found in a sample of 97 individuals with a pervasive developmental disorder: "A total of 97 children (79.4% male) were confirmed to have a PDD. The prevalence of PDDs was estimated to be 62.6 (95% confidence interval, 50.8-76.3) per 10 000 children.Prevalences were 16.8 per 10 000 for autistic disorder …

There's a tremendous amount of research literature that does not make it into public consumption. Coupling this lack of trickle down with a voracious need to feel certainty where none may exist, many parents faced with an autism diagnosis will gravitate towards those individuals who offer the certainty they are seeking. They find this certainty, these assurances, not with mainstream medicine or psychology, but with alternative medicine and snake oil salesman who offer guarantees that cannot be delivered on. That's okay, though, most of the time, for the con men plying unsuspecting and…

Most of this is an older article I wrote on the inaccuracy of the oft-repeated 80% divorce rate. A new study out of Kennedy Krieger Institute today shows that this statistic is emphatically not correct: “64 percent of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) belong to a family with two married biological or adoptive parents, compared with 65 percent of children who do not have an ASD.” According to the website, researchers came up with these figures from “ data from the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health[1] , they examined a nationally representative sample…

By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institute have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia. High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual pr bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy,…

People who focus too much on how they will achieve a goal are more likely to fail than individuals who think abstractly about why they want to do something. Researchers from The University of Delaware and the University of Florida found this to be case among people trying to lose weight or save money. Results of their study were published in the Journal of Consumer Research. The authors found that when people focus on concrete aspects of how they want to achieve goals, they become more closed-minded and less likely to take advantage of opportunities that fall outside their plans. And, in…

Both scientists and non scientists have a tendency to regard science and culture as different and parallel, if not competing things, between which one can or must choose. Science is not conceived of as an alternative, either neutral or competitive to culture but rather as a central component of a human culture more broadly understood, a component that existed long before the term science was coined and will long outlast current understandings of science as a specialized or privileged activity that can be engaged in only by members of a self perpetuating professional community. I strongly…