Expert: Ettina - 10/25/2008

Question
Hello,
I am trying to gain a better understanding of autism for two main reasons. First and foremost I am in an alternative certification program in which I am in school for my masters in SED. Secondly, I am a full time substitute teacher, and finding more and more students with ASD. I feel I need a better understanding of what emotional affects are there associated with having autism and also what exclusionary criteria are there? Thank you for your time

Terri

Answer
Regarding emotional effects of autism, because I'm not sure what you mean, I'll answer according to the two possible interpretations that come to mind.
Firstly, there is the issue of inherent emotional differences in autistic people. The biggest difference is that autistic people tend to have different likes and dislikes than non-autistic people, due to various features such as intense interests, sensory sensitivities, etc.
Specific common forms of emotional differences include love of patterns and predictability, decreased need for interaction (for example, though I often feel lonely, I seem to need more time alone before this occurs), lack of sexual desire or later development of sexual desire (often in their early 20s instead of teens), love of animals, etc. Not all autistic people have these kind of emotional differences, but they are more common. There is also some evidence that bipolar disorder may be more common in autism.
There are also differences due to lack of social communication of emotions. Autistic people tend to have different nonverbal signals, meaning that they will often misinterpret other people's emotions and vice versa. This is often portrayed as a deficit in autism, but it's really more like speaking another language. Some people have compared it to inter-cultural miscommunications, such as when two cultures have different norms for personal space and therefore one culture seems cold & distant to the other culture that is seen as intrusive. The big difference, however, is that the autistic person is more likely to know not to interpret other person's behavior as whatever it would mean from an autistic person - even if they don't know the specifics of it, they know they are different.
Secondly, growing up different has an emotional impact as well. For one thing, many autistic people are treated badly by others, such as being bullied by classmates, being considered rude or weird by people who don't understand how they relate to others, or having parents who are disappointed and upset about not having the kind of child they'd hoped to have.
The specifics are somewhat different depending on how obviously different they are - whether they just seem odd or whether they're more obviously disabled. If they're more obviously disabled, they tend to be pitied, underestimated and excluded, while the ones who just seem odd are more often disliked, overestimated and bullied (although the line varies by setting and age so many have been treated in both ways). As a teacher, one of the biggest things you can do to impact on this is to be very vigilant and proactive about bullying - as well as treating the autistic person respectfully and with toleration of differences.
Most autistic people are aware they are different, especially as they get older. Often this is underestimated by others, especially if they have trouble speaking (although lower functioning autistics may be less aware of differences, they're also more obviously different, so it kind of evens out). Some may know the specific name for their difference, others just know something is different between them and most people.
Either way, they absorb messages about what their difference means from many different sources, such as how people treat them and talk about them, how people talk about differences generally, and observation of how other autistic or disabled people are treated (one woman talked about how as she was growing up, the only adults 'like her' that she saw were on outings from institutions, and this made her worry that she'd be institutionalized as an adult as well). Those who know their disability label also hear stuff specifically about that disability, such as news articles about autism, and this also has an impact on them. One boy, for example, saw a news story about parents of autistic kids 'fixing their children' and asked his mom if he'd been fixed yet.
As for exclusionary criteria, autism is based on a collection of traits and as long as you 'check off' enough traits you meet the criteria, regardless of the presence or absence of any particular trait. For example, eye contact, sociability, ability to speak, etc do not mean a person is not autistic, provided they meet enough other criteria. In general, however, all autistic people have some sort of social differences, and some sort of obsessive and/or repetitive behavior.