Just caught the end of a documentary about Autism. Can anyone explain to me what causes this illness? I am guessing that it is some kind of brain disorder?
There's no definitive answer to the cure. Because it can't be diagnosed until the child is around 3 or 4 it is impossible to say whether they are born with it or get it in that period between birth and diagnosis. Here's something from my revision notes:
Causes
Family and Environmental
Bettleheim: Argued that at a critical time in the child’s early life parents mistreated the child by not loving him or her. Several researchers have reported that the parents of autistic children were cold, distant, insensitive and highly intellectual. The child finds that their actions have little impact on unresponsive parents and that their own efforts to influence the world are no use.
Evaluation: Used a limited sample and based his work on the use of selective information. Overlooked families who had other non-autistic children. Raazan found that parents of children with autism were warmer and more sociable in comparison to other parents. They need support and not condemnation.
Social Learning Theory
Ferster: Claimed that behaviour was controlled by its consequences and that praise and love are powerful secondary reinforcers. The behaviour of children with autism is a result of inadequate reinforcers because the children are neglected.
Evaluation: Used a limited sample and based his work on the use of selective information. Overlooked families who had other non-autistic children.
Cognitive Approaches
Theory of Mind: All autistic children have mind-blindness. They do not understand mental states and how they govern behaviour. There is evidence to suggest that people suffering from autism cannot infer what other people are thinking this can be demonstrated by the Sally-Anne Test.
Baron-Cohen: Sally-Anne – found that most 4 year olds gave the correct answer, but only 20% of the children with autism answered correctly.
Happe: This may be due to damage to the right hemisphere of the brain.
Evaluation: It doesn’t explain all the aspects of the condition, e.g. savants. A savant is a person with unusual gifts such as playing a tune after hearing it.
Central Coherence Deficits: People with autism process information differently to other people. Central coherence is the ability to process information by getting an overall or global view. We use context to aid our understanding (Frith, 1989).
Hermelin and O’Conner: Normal people remember sentences better than unrelated strings of words but people with autism perform equally well on both tasks, suggesting that they cannot use meaning or context.
Biological Basis
Studies by Frisk, Briskman and Happe indicate that in families with autistic children, the fathers in particular were better at tasks requiring focusing on individual detail than the fathers whose sons were not suffering from autism, suggesting a possible genetic link. Also, there is a high concordance rate between monozygotic twins.
