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GLD E-portfolio
Key Insight #3: Work
When people think about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the symptoms that often come to mind are of head banging, meltdowns, and extreme social deficits. Yet I have learned that there is so much more to autism than the most overt symptoms. Autism is a complex disorder that portrays itself in all aspects of life, often in subtle, hard-to-notice ways. Unfortunately, all too often, these subtle symptoms are ignored. Thus, my learning both within and beyond the classroom has made me realize that the subtle symptoms of autism are equally important as the overt symptoms, yet knowledge of these symptoms is severely lacking.
When my class first began studying autism in my Child Behavioral and Mental Disorders course, PSYC 510, we discussed overt symptoms almost exclusively. In my class notes, you can see the highlighted sections which indicate every ASD symptom. Of these symptoms covered in class, only 14% are subtle symptoms (blue highlighter), making 86% of them overt symptoms (yellow highlighter). As indicated, these overt symptoms include poor eye contact, failure to develop peer relations, selective mutism, attention and aggressive problems, and language difficulties. The three subtle symptoms discussed were looking at different parts of the face instead of the eyes, a difficulty in integrating the sound and sight of people talking, and executive functioning difficulties (planning, organizing, thinking of the whole instead of only the parts). When speaking of social symptoms of ASD, I remember sitting in class being told that autistic children do not want friends, that they are perfectly happy being by themselves at school (this fell under the “failure to develop peer relations section). What struck me, however, is that my experience with autism taught me that children with ASD very much want friendships, they just do not know how to go about making a friend. This subtle difference- the reason behind the action- is something that we failed to discuss in this class, something that never sat right with me. Overall, in this class we focused almost entirely on the overt symptoms. Yet this learning did not match up with my experience of ASD. Thus, when presented with the opportunity to work in Dr. Bradshaw’s research lab studying the early signs of autism, I jumped at the opportunity because I was hoping to learn about a more rounded view of ASD symptomology and uncover the subtle cues of autism.
Working in the lab as a Research Assistant, I was able to develop my own study that examined the relationship between the acceptance of autistic behavior and general knowledge of ASD. In doing so, I scoured research databases to find an autism acceptance scale that examined the subtle symptoms of autism. This is evident in the PowerPoint I presented to my colleagues in the Lab about the study I was developing, presented above. As you can see on the third slide, I learned that the most widely used scale that examined the acceptance of ASD was developed by Harnum et al. and called the ‘Autism Openness Scale’ (2006). This scale presents different scenarios about a college aged person’s autistic behavior. Besides identifying the individual as having autism, the scale also only presents overt symptoms. Contrastively, the study I was conducting sought to examine the subtle symptoms of autism in a typical, every-day environment so that the ‘autistic behavior’ presented in the scenario cannot be easily identified as an autistic behavior. Thus, for my study to successfully examine the subtle symptoms of ASD, I had to create my own scale, called the ‘Autism Acceptance Scale.’ The scale and its questions are displayed on slide four. Thus, my learning in the research lab as an individual researcher taught me that the subtle symptoms of autism are not widely studied. I discovered this gap in the research and thus developed my own experiment. The research papers I read to create the Autism Acceptance Scale validated that there are many subtle, often missed, symptoms of autism but these symptoms had yet to be included in a scale for measuring autism acceptance.
My learning in the classroom in PSYC 510 taught me about the overt symptoms of ASD but only a small percentage of the subtle symptoms. My learning in the research lab affirmed that the overt symptoms are the most studied, which is probably why these are what I learned about in class, yet also taught me that there are subtle symptoms of ASD and that the study of these symptoms is lacking in the research field. Thus, the study I developed seeks to help with this gap in research and further my learning of the symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder. The demonstrated learning will help me in the future in my career path as a school psychologist because I have learned the importance of valuing all symptoms of a disorder which I believe will apply to beyond just ASD.
Works Cited
Harnum, M., Duffy, J., & Ferguson, D. A. (2006). Adults’ Versus Children’s Perceptions of a Child with Autism or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37, 1337-1343. doi: 10.1007/s10803-006-0273-0
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