Week 3 Reading Flashcards
(6 cards)
What is the “female protective effect”
there is something inherent in being female which reduces the likelihood of developing autism
Supporting evidence of female protective effect:
Autism is more commonly diagnosed in males than females across ages (Fombonne 2009; Russell et al. 2011).
autistic females possess relatively more spontaneous, non-inherited mutations associated with autism than males (Gilman et al. 2011; Levy et al. 2011).
Evidence against female protective charactersistic
the condition is underdiagnosed in females, perhaps because females express their autism in ways which do not meet current diagnostic criteria.
no specific protective factor has been conclusively demonstrated as yet.
most studies assume current estimates of male and female diagnostic rates are accurate.
○ Females require more additional difficulties than males to receive an autism diagnosis, despite having equivalent levels of autistic characteristics (Duvekot et al. 2017; Dworzynski et al. 2012; Shattuck et al. 2009).
How does the female autism phenotype differ from the male autism phenotype?
Females with low IQ are more likely to receive a diagnosis than females with high IQ (Rivet and Matson 2011; Van Wijngaarden-Cremers et al. 2014).
adult women are seeking and receiving autism diagnoses to a greater extent than men (Happé et al. 2016), supporting the argument that these women were even more likely to be missed at a younger age
Social skills: Some research has suggested that autistic females may have fewer social impairments than males; autistic females tend to have higher levels of social motivation (the desire and intent to form friendships with others) than males on average (Head et al. 2014; Hiller et al. 2014). autistic females may find it harder to maintain long-term friendships or relationships than autistic males, despite having similar levels of motivation for social relationships as non-autistic females (Hiller et al. 2014).
Conflict in social relationships may also be harder for autistic females to cope with than autistic males or non-autistic females (Sedgewick et al. 2019).
Studies have found that autistic males’ interests tend to be focused on more mechanical topics such as vehicles, computers or physics (Grove et al. 2018; Nowell et al. 2019).
autistic females’ interests appear to focus more on topics with relational purposes, such as animals, fictional characters or psychology (Grove et al. 2018; Mandy et al. 2012; McFayden et al. 2018; Nowell et al. 2019).
§ The needs of autistic males may come to teachers’ attention sooner and be seen as more intrusive, than females, who may be seen as shy or simply anxious (Hiller et al. 2014). Females’ internalising difficulties may, therefore, not only leave them more vulnerable to serious mental health conditions, but also reduce the likelihood of their autism being recognised.
What is camouflaging?
compensating for and masking autistic characteristics
conscious or unconscious strategies, which may be explicitly learned or implicitly developed, to minimise the appearance of autistic characteristics during a social setting (Hull et al. 2017a; Lai et al. 2011).
aspect of the female phenotype
- Examples include mimicking facial expressions of the person you are talking to (whether consciously or not), or forcing oneself to make eye contact and to stop talking about an interest.
Compensation describes the use of alternative cognitive strategies to overcome specific socio-cognitive or behavioural difficulties in autism. For instance, an autistic individual might compensate for theory of mind difficulties by using executive function strategies to learn to recognise different facial expressions
Strategies, such as staying close to other girls to avoid standing out (Gould and Ashton-Smith 2011), or adapting to school environments so difficulties were not identified by teachers (Hiller et al. 2014; Mandy et al. 2012) have also been proposed.
Potential consequences of camouflaging?
physical and emotional exhaustion, often requiring time alone to recover; issues around identity and authenticity which led some participants to “lose track of who I really am” (Hull et al. 2017a; p 2530); and difficulty accessing support and diagnosis.
