Anyone Here Diagnosed Schizoid?

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btbnnyr - Just curious, what does the latest research (which you believe is valid) say about the relationship between ASD and Short-Term Memory and Executive Functioning?

So I got the report in the mail today and I am so irritated with it that I scarcely know what to do. Lots of incorrect details, ignoring details, and then telling me that I overfocus on details in the report!

I was mistaken; I didn't take the WMS. I took:

Wechsler IV - social Cognition
Wide Range Achievement Test - 4
California Verbal Learning Test - II
Trail Making Test Parts A & B

The basis of the evaluation seems to be

1. high verbal IQ and my average/high average scores on the WRAT - 4
2. my (supposedly) superior verbal memory on the CVLT - II (that's the test on which I used visualization).
3. average executive function on Wisconsin test (which was inaccurate due to repeat administration) and superior performance on ToL, on which she apparently ignored my moderately-severely impaired range of time scores and my 3 time violations
4. average scores on Social Perception, Affect Naming, and Faces on the WAIS-IV social cognition test, apparently ignoring my mildly-moderately impaired score on prosody and my moderately-severely impaired score on some called "Pairs" (another auditory social test). Also, some of the Faces scores were also probably inaccurate due to repeat administration.
5. I scored borderline-low probability of AS on GADS
6. they made big mistakes recording my childhood social experiences and perceptions
7. overestimating the role of childhood trauma (I almost wish I had never mentioned that)

I think that is a healthy attitude to have, perhaps one that fellow WP members could make use of. Some of the things people post on this site make me wonder if they are too caught up in the idea of Asperger's or autism as an identity, so caught up that they are either afraid to pursue a diagnosis because the doctor might "invalidate" their identity, or they can't or won't accept the results of the assessment(s) they've already had. I don't accuse anyone, I just wonder.

Personally, I have come to the same attitude as you've come to (I don't disagree with the diagnoses I was given, by the way). I've had what seemed like some half-assed diagnoses handed to me, and I was frustrated that the doctors seemed to have missed or discounted symptoms, given me shady tests (or no tests, in one case), and misinterpreted results, and so I was on the warpath to get another assessment, a "real" assessment, and so forth; and this was exacerbated by my endless feelings of being misunderstood, which are far and away my most troubling pet peeve (and a large reason for the schizoid presentation, ironically). But now I know that it is foolhardy to expect anyone to see who I "really am" over the course of a few hours worth of assessment, and that diagnoses based on these assessments will necessarily be approximate. They will never be fully-assed, even if made by a psychologist whom I saw regularly.

In addition, reading posts from some of these "identity Aspies" put the idea in my mind that certain kinds of antagonism or distrust towards mental health professionals (or unprofessionals) is a toxic, unrealistic, and fruitless state of mind for me, and that I must accept their mistakes and oversights as part of the nature of humans and the state of contemporary psychology and simply account for it in my expectations.

So now I look at diagnoses in a more practical matter, although neuropsychological tests have become a new interest of mine and I am burning a bit to share with the person who examined me my insights concerning the WMS.
I'm kind of unsatisfied with this post, but I can't pinpoint why and I'm tired of editing it, so here it is.

On working memory, the behavioral results are mixed, with some studies showing deficits in working memory and some showing no group differences between autism vs. normal. Discrepancies are probably due to small samples (<10 participants in each group in some studies) and sampling variation. The most consistent result so far is that regardless of performance, fMRI suggests less prefrontal activation on working memory tasks in autism, more posterior (visual areas) activation. In our lab, I am doing working memory project with collaborator (participants are normal people), but one thing I accidentally discovered while testing my task was my huge working memory that was visually operated. We used a n-back task in which you have to remember a certain number of numbers and match the current one with the one n-back, where n = 2, 3, 4, etc, as task difficulty increases. You have to keep updating new numbers and dropping old numbers as they become irrelevant and also keep the numbers in their correct slots. I found that my performance at 16-back was still better than other people's at 3-back, which they found difficult and I found absolutely trivial, easier than breathing. I told my professor that in order to do well on n-back at high n, you should use visual instead of verbal strategy. At first, he didn't believe me, but then he tried my visual strategy, and his performance suddenly improved a lot.

Another thing about working memory task is that it generally drops sharply around middle age (~50).

My current working memory is considered verbal (but can be solved visually instead), and I am working on a spatial working memory task from hell. Spatial tasks can ackshuly be verbally mediated instead.