What is Asperger's Syndrome..?
Answer:
Helpnout has a great answer and I'd just like to add acouple of things to it.
The disorder affects people in various ways, but individuals with Asperger's commonly share characteristics such as an ability to focus intensely on areas of interest, hyposensitivity/hypersensitivi... to certain stimuli and sensory integration problems, self-stimulating ('stimming') behaviors such as rocking back and forth or verbal utterances, and difficulty interpreting facial expressions and other social cues. Some positive characteristics include things such as enhanced mental focus, excellent memory abilities, superior spatial skills, and an intuitive understanding of logical systems. These characteristics can often lead to fulfilling careers in mathematics, engineering, the sciences, music, art, or language.
Although there is no single feature that all people with AS share, difficulties with social behavior are nearly universal and are one of the most important defining criteria. People with AS may lack the ability to communicate their own emotional state (alexithymia) and the natural ability to see the subtexts of social interaction, resulting in well-meaning remarks that may offend, or finding it hard to know what is "acceptable." The unwritten rules of social behavior that mystify so many with AS have been termed the "hidden curriculum." People with AS must learn these social skills intellectually through seemingly contrived, dry, math-like logic rather than intuitively through normal emotional interaction
1. Difficulty reading the social and emotional messages in the eyes: those with AS don't look at eyes often, and when they do, they can't read them.
2. Making literal interpretation: Some AS individuals have trouble interpreting colloquialisms, sarcasm, and metaphors.
3. Being considered disrespectful and rude: prone to egocentric behavior, individuals with Asperger's miss cues and warning signs that this behavior is inappropriate.
4. Honesty and deception: children with Asperger's are often considered "too honest," and may even proclaim themselves to be "honest" or "frank" as a way of explaining their behavior. They have difficulty being deceptive, even at the expense of hurting someone's feelings.
Inadequate nonverbal communication: their facial expressions, hand gestures, and other forms of body language, are sometimes limited.
5. Becoming aware of making social errors: as children with Asperger's mature, and become aware of their inability to connect, their fear of making a social mistake, and their self-criticism when they do so, can lead to social phobia.
6. Differences in speech: they display less speech intonation than neurotypical persons. Their speech may be perceived as "flat." However, those with AS also possess superficial fluency in day-to-day conversation.
6. A sense of paranoia: because of their inability to connect, persons with Asperger's have trouble distinguishing the difference between the deliberate or accidental actions of others, which can in turn lead to a feeling of paranoia.
7. Managing conflict: being unable to understand other points of view can lead to inflexibility and an inability to negotiate conflict resolution. Once the conflict is resolved, remorse may not be evident.
8. Sense of humor: although jokes can be grasped at an intellectual level, the emotional worth of humor, in some Asperger individuals, is not appreciated. Smiles and laughter may appear unnatural with some Aspergers.
9. Awareness of hurting the feelings of others: some Aspergers exhibit a lack of empathy, which often leads to unintentionally offensive or insensitive behaviors.
10. Repairing someone's feelings: lacking intuition about the feelings of others, people with AS have little understanding of how to console someone or how to make them feel better.
11. Recognizing signs of boredom: inability to understand other people's interests can lead AS persons to be inattentive to others. Conversely, people with AS often fail to notice when others are uninterested.
12. Introspection and self-consciousness: individuals with AS have difficulty understanding their own feelings or their impact on the feelings of other people.
13. Clothing and personal hygiene: people with AS tend to be less affected by peer pressure than others. As a result, they often do what is comfortable and are unconcerned about their impact on others.
14. Reciprocal love and grief: since people with AS have difficulty emotionally, their expressions of affection and grief are often short and weak.
15. Lack of participation in chitchat: they are not generally interested in, and do not participate in idle chat and gossip.
16. Preference of routine: they prefer routine work, and are not able to cope well to changes, even small ones. Such disruptions from routine can cause stress and anxiety.
17. Coping with criticism: people with AS are compelled to correct mistakes, even when they are made by someone in a position of authority, such as a teacher. For this reason, they can be unwittingly offensive.
18. Formal mannerisms and etiquette: their etiquette is formal, even within the family. Their speech may be interlaced with "thank you" or "please" or "good evening" more than necessary. Some persons with AS may even insist that other members of their family follow this ritual.
19. Speed and quality of social processing: because they respond through reasoning and not intuition, AS individuals tend to process social information more slowly than the norm, leading to uncomfortable pauses or delays in response. This means that although the AS individual will tend to make a more reasoned and balanced understanding and/or decision, it can lead to the AS individual being told to use their 'common sense' to solve problems, a concept they cannot understand or use in the way a neurotypical person can.
20. Faithfulness towards family: people with AS are staunchly faithful to their spouses and/or immediate members of their family.
21. Exhaustion: as people with AS begin to understand theory of mind, they must make a deliberate effort to process social information. This often leads to mental exhaustion.
22. Financial imprudence: although some people with AS can manage their own finances, in many cases linear thinking impedes their ability to make larger financial decisions, where they require the assistance of others.
Probably no one with Asperger Syndrome exhibits all of these behaviors. As with autism, it's a spectrum disorder and people having varying degrees of affliction. My 16 year old sonhas Asperger's and has a 4.0 grade point average in high school, knows more math than I did after three semesters of calculus, plays in a local symphony orchestra and scored 1570 on the original two sections of the SAT out of a possible 1600. For a long time he had problems with dealing with people as he could not read emotional states and often couldn't tell that I was annoyed with something he was doing until he had aggravated the crap out of me, and had few friends. However, he has worked on his social skills and now makes friends, while not exactly easily, but well and has a good group of friends. The important things are to remember that they don't pick up social clues very well, so you need to be verbal in communication (and remember that they tend to be very literal), to teach them to read the various non-verbal cues and to allow them to explore the areas that they are interested in as they can often lead to very rewarding lives.
If you have any questions that I, as the father of an Asperger Syndrome child can answer just e-mail me.
It's a mild form of autism, in which the person has an underdeveloped ability to contemplate what's on somebody else's mind. In other words, social subtleties, social cues, etc. go right past them. They tend to be intelligent, but lacking social skills.
in addition, also like autistic children they usually have a very keen interest in a particular catagory. strangely , a good number of asperger sufferers are extremely mechanical with a special interest in engines. Their brains wrap around things differently then ours. Many believe Einstein had Aspergers. They can function in society but will rarely look you in the eye. Socially awkward.
Asperger's is one of five disorders that falls under the umbrella of Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD), a category of neurological disorders characterized by “severe and pervasive impairment in several areas of development.”
Characteristics:
The essential features of Asperger's Disorder are severe and sustained impairment in social interaction and the development of restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interest, and activity. The disturbance must clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, and other important areas of functioning. In contrast to Autistic Disorder, there are no clinically significant delays in language. In addition there are no clinically significant delays in cognitive development or in the development of age-appropriate self-help skills, adaptive behavior, and curiosity about the environment in childhood.
A. Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following:
-Marked impairment in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction
-Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level
-A lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people)
-Lack of social or emotional reciprocity
B. Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following:
-Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus
-Apparently inflexible adherence to specific, non-functional routines or rituals
-Stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole-body movements)
-Persistent preoccupation with parts of objects
C. The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
D. There is no clinically significant general delay in language (e.g., single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years)
E. There is no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of age-appropriate self-help skills, adaptive behavior (other than in social interaction), and curiosity about the environment in childhood.
F. Criteria are not met for another specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder or Schizophrenia
Please, remember people who have Asperger's are not stupid,
-- Their brain just happens to work differently than others. So, outside influences, like noise,smell--enviormental factors-- can cause emotional distress.
Try google.com...type 'asperger's syndrome' into the search bar. Press 'search'.
Some good explanation posted , go to you tube and there are over 6000 videos of people with this form of Autism.
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