Correlation between Asperger's symptoms

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As far as I understand, Asperger's has symptoms in several, seemingly unrelated areas:
- social/communication/epathy
- interests
- aversion to change
- sensory processing

I don't see what is the relation between, say rigidity and difficulty in social situations, or between hypersensitivity and special interests. But I guess psychologists didn't just grab a few random symptoms and named them Asperger's syndrome. How and how much are these symptoms correlated?

(Note: This is also one of the things that make online tests, particularly those wih a single score, unreliable: there high scores in one area compensate low scores in another, while in the actual definition they don't.)

I don't know of any correlational studies on this done by academic psychologists. Nor would I put much faith in them if they did exist.

Modern psychology (apart from clinical psychology) is based on observations of learning and behaviour. There are so many ways that studies in academic psychology can be warped by bias, design flaws, faulty method and 'altered' or convenient findings (used to advance individual career paths) that correlational psychology seems to me to have little validity, especially when applied to minority groups.

If you're hypersensitive to something, you're super-focused on it. You're also super-focused upon your special interests.

Social situations demand flexibility. Aspies tend to be rigid; hence, they experience difficulty in navigating social situations because they are not "flexible."

One could be averse to change because change involves an increase in sensory-processing demands.

Wow, very good post. I think it is largely random and seemingly unrelated traits.

Now, the fact that we do have sensory issues means it takes more concentration to socialize and thus we can do it for less often. Combined with that 'normal' is defined so narrowly, if I'm a little bit different, a fair number of people will non-include and non-accept me. It's their loss, but it's also my loss, too.

PS I don't know if the intense world theory of autism is strictly true, but it is kind of a good metaphor.

They correlate with our sensory issues.

Possible. But strange in the light of that actually "Abnormal responses to sensory stimuli are not mentioned in any diagnostic scheme, although they have been associated with AS."

One psychological theory about ASD is the "Intense World Theory" (IWT): http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00224/abstract

The rough idea in IWT is that ASD brains process related information more intensely: it gives us great attention to detail, for example, but we are easily overloaded by stimulation that most (NT) people find "just right" but we (ASD people) find "too much".

The Theory claims that it can tie together all the aspects of ASD that you mention:

- social/communication/epathy: faces etc are too intense so we avoid them. In fact, we find people in general require just too much intense processing - we are overstimulated, burnt out, by interactions that the average NT would not find too intense. As people and social interaction are one of the major stimulants for the (NT) human brain, they are guaranteed to be too stimulating for the ASD brain.

- interests: our attention to detail, our aversion to change, and our brains geared for technical thinking rather than social thinking mean that we specialise in (fall in love with) specific topics where the specific details keep our brain interested, while the general familiarity stops us from being overwhelmed by too much novelty. Special interests help us to (hyper)focus on one thing - meaning that we get to filter out everything else and ignore it ... thereby reducing the load on our intensely processing brains while keeping them interested in something.

- aversion to change: new things require a lot more processing than familiar things (for people in general, not just ASDies). IWT predicts that ASD brains would find new experiences overwhelming because there is so much to process, and the ASD brain tries to process it all intensely, causing overload. So the ASD person seeks out the familiar in order to reduce this too intense processing.

- sensory processing: we process sensory inputs intensely, so that the world seems too loud, too bright, etc. IWT woud definitely predict strong sensory sensitivity for people with ASD.

IWT is one of the more interesting psychological accounts of ASD, IMHO. I am not an expert in it, but Henry Markram - the guy who puts IWT forward - is a leading neuroscientist in Europe. One of his research projects has been given a massive grant to model the human brain, so he is not a minor figure in the neuroscience world. He also has a son with ASD, which got him interested in researching the topic.

That was true under DSM-IV, but not under DSM5.

DSM5 introduced unusual sensory behaviour as one of the possible symptoms in the broad category of "RRBI" (repetitive and restrictive behaviors and interests". So sensory sensitivity now does count towards an ASD diagnosis:


Wikipedia has not kept up with the latest DSM.

Answer: They're all exacerbated by digestive issues.

one-A-N, that's an interesting theory.

It also means that my AS-like symptoms - mainly in the social/empathy and the interest areas, but not the sensory issues - are likely completely unrelated.

They might be unrelated, but they are frequently found, to varying degrees, in Aspies.

I guess the task in research is to find how they are related--how directly they are related.

Research won't tell the whole story, though.

It's a very individual thing, I believe. In some, the correlations might exist, in others, not so much.

I think that is an incorrect guess, as this is exactly what happened on the DSM boards.

All neurodiversity-traits are correlated to some extent, but neurodiversity is much broader than Asperger's, so there are a lot of traits that are not part of the AS definition that are correlated to AS diagnosis. OTOH, it is possible to find factors within neurodiversity. Aspie Quiz currently have 12, and they have been validated with factor analysis.

Update:
A significant correlation between the social, interest and sensory areas can be deduced from this study of the RAADS-R test: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3134766/ , Table 3.

The vast majority of people on the autism spectrum score above the threshold on all scales. On the other side, only 3-5% of the general population are above the threshold in the three scales I mentioned. Assuming that roughly 1% of the population has an autism spectrum disorder, and most of that 1% is above the threshold on all scales, this means that if you score above the threshold on one scale, you have at least a 20-30% chance to be autistic and score above the threshold on any other scale (plus some chance to score above the threshold despite not being autistic). This means that if you have one symptom, you are much more likely to have another symptom than the general population.

Another thing that shows correlation is that the most aspies (85% in this study, different numbers but >50% in other studies) have sensory symptoms even though those were not part of the diagnostic criteria until recently.

It would be interesting to investigate the number of people who have some symptoms but not others, and their diagnoses (positive or negative), but the sample size and the data in the article is not enough for that.

I just completed reading an interesting book by Dr. Valerie Gaus entitled, ?Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Adult Asperger Syndrome?. Dr. Gaus suggests that an idiosyncratic information-processing system ties all this stuff together. Below is a framework that Dr. Gaus uses to explain how these deficits lead to other mental health issues (including, but not limited to, anxiety and depression).

[img][800:664]http://www.anony.ws/i/2014/05/08/8lWAo.jpg[/img]

Traits correlate, and this form what we call autism or asperger, etc.

http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=dqhl3a&s=8#.U3mbWdKSyIw

Think of it this way:

In Asperger's, the immediate world around is very "loud". Everything in immediate environs, and internally, is experienced intensely and with poor awareness of connections amongst those things, also poor awareness of connections between those things and the world beyond. Colors, sounds, fabrics, tastes, everything is very loud.

Other people are outside of this, except as objects; other people's realities don't compete with the intensity of the local experience; the "tune" of daily life is extremely important and disrupting it feels horrible; things feel absolute and urgent.

I don't see any problem with the usual traits coming out of that. My experience has been that a good deal of childhood's "loudness" has faded, but I'm still apparently extremely intense compared with most middle-aged women. I was very much surprised to hear that others find my daughter intense; she seems very calm, harmony-seeking, go-along-get-along to me, except when she's abruptly angry, and it's like a magnesium flash with her, then it's over.

Maybe others' experience is different.