by Tom Cutler
I find it difficult to work out people’s intentions.Definitely agree / Slightly agree / Slightly disagree / Definitely disagree
New situations make me anxious.Definitely agree / Slightly agree / Slightly disagree / Definitely disagree
I enjoy meeting new people.Definitely agree / Slightly agree / Slightly disagree / Definitely disagree
I am a good diplomat.Definitely agree / Slightly agree / Slightly disagree / Definitely disagree
I am not very good at remembering people’s date of birth.Definitely agree / Slightly agree / Slightly disagree / Definitely disagree
I find it very easy to play games with children that involve pretending.Definitely agree / Slightly agree / Slightly disagree / Definitely disagree
SOURCE: AUTISM RESEARCH CENTRE
Scoring
Score 1 point per question if you ticked ‘Definitely agree’ or ‘Slightly agree’ for questions 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 33, 35, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, and 46.
Score 1 point per question if you ticked ‘Definitely disagree’ or ‘Slightly disagree’ for questions 1, 3, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 44, 47, 48, 49, and 50.
For a final result, add up the total number of points you have scored.
Nobody really scores zero on the Autism Quotient. Everybody has some autistic traits. But this does not mean that everybody is ‘a bit autistic’. The average (mean) AQ score for non-autistic people is about 17, with men typically scoring a couple of points higher than women. But the great majority of average intelligence Aspergers score 32 or more, indicating clinically significant levels of autistic traits. A score of less than 26 effectively rules out Asperger’s syndrome.
If you score highly on the test, other members of your family — parents, brothers, sisters, children — are also likely to score highly. There is genetic evidence that some (though not all) parents of autistic children exhibit the same autism traits as their offspring, though to a milder degree. This sub-autistic group is referred to by the off-putting technical name ‘broader autism phenotype’ or BAP. The BAP is a cloud of people sharing autistic attributes in common, who don’t score high enough on the AQ to win an autism diagnosis. In any case, the presence of just one person in the family having autism greatly increases the likelihood of somebody else in the family also having it.
The exact male-to-female ratio for autism and Asperger’s syndrome in the general population is the subject of much debate. For classic autism, it is commonly said to be four males for every female, with the ratio for Asperger’s syndrome being much higher, at nine males to every female, though there is good evidence that, in girls and women, autism, including Asperger’s, is routinely missed because they express it differently. For example, female Aspergers seem to be better at blending in and camouflaging their autistic traits. Perhaps one day the number of diagnosed girls and women will equal the number of boys and men.
In the evolutionary past, when our cavewomen ancestors were multi-tasking, cuddling babies, chopping radishes, and organising the village between themselves, caveman behaviour such as going off with some other blokes in search of dinner, with a couple of good spears designed and made by themselves, was no doubt useful. An ability to spot the movement of a deer in the brush and hit it without being distracted by social chitchat would have been a useful talent. Today, when we hunt our food not on the savannah but in the supermarket, and don’t need to build a bridge over every stream we encounter, such typically male skills as single-mindedness and attention to systems have been usefully shifted to fields such as engineering and science.
Hans Asperger noted that the children he had studied tended to have a gift for logic and scientific observation. Precise thinking and formulating were so highly developed in them, he said, that their relationship to other people had been ‘lost’. ‘For success in science,’ he remarked, ‘a dash of autism is essential’.
To test the idea that there is a genetic association between scientific and mathematical aptitude, technical intelligence, and the risk of autism in offspring, Simon Baron-Cohen decided to look at a town with a concentration of nerdy occupations. Choosing Eindhoven, Holland’s Silicon Valley, where a third of jobs are in IT, he found the rate of child autism to be more than twice that of Haarlem or Utrecht, towns with comparable demographics but no concentration of IT jobs. The clear inference was that the high rate of technical occupations among parents was associated with an increased likelihood of autism in offspring.
Baron-Cohen also discovered that an unusually high number of autistic children had fathers and grandfathers, on both sides of the family, who were engineers. Like having an intense interest in trains, having a parent or grandparent who was an engineer seems to be a badge that indicates an increased likelihood of autism.
It is often said that, along with their preoccupation with technology, systems, engineering, and science, people with Asperger’s syndrome do not feel empathy. Dr Watson describes his friend Sherlock Holmes as ‘an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence …’ This is a perfect description of the Asperger’s aloof and seemingly unempathic detachment.
The definition of ‘empathy’ in Oxford’s online dictionary is ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’, and if you are judged to lack this quality you are viewed as missing something essentially human. The parable of the Good Samaritan embodies the essence of empathy.
Empathy may be sorted into two kinds: cognitive (intellectual) and affective (emotional). Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand the feelings of others, and is related to the theory of mind. Affective empathy is quite different: it is the sensibility aroused by someone’s suffering, and the consequent desire to help. Psychopaths are experts in cognitive empathy, understanding how a person is feeling and why, but lacking in affective empathy. They are not touched. This is why they can lie persuasively, often with great charm, or be coldly cruel and manipulative.
Unlike psychopaths, autistics have trouble with cognitive empathy, and find it difficult to understand the reasons for another person’s feelings. They are confused by people and may unwittingly say harsh things or give their undiluted opinion without grasping that this might be hurtful. If chided they may miss the point and object that what they are saying is true. Their affective empathy, however, is intact. They feel sadness at someone’s suffering. They become upset, show concern, and wish to help, and they often have a very strong moral conscience.
A genetic contribution to the trait of empathy was demonstrated in a striking piece of research published by the Autism Research Centre in 2013. The study linked a particular gene, the forgettably named GABRB3 gene, not only to empathy but also to Asperger’s syndrome. The team described abnormal social behaviour in GABRB3-deficient mice. Unlike control mice with normal GABRB3, the affected mice tended to avoid contact when introduced to a stranger mouse. They also demonstrated repetitive behaviour, thus displaying two core traits needed for a (human) diagnosis of an autism spectrum condition. When the studies were extended to humans with Asperger’s syndrome they confirmed that variations in GABRB3 are connected with differences in empathy and Asperger’s syndrome alike.
Despite these findings, some people with Asperger’s syndrome maintain that it is non-autistics who are truly unempathic. People with more typical brains often fail to understand, or make any effort to understand, how Aspergers feel or why they are behaving in certain ways. At school and at work Aspergers routinely put up with a good deal of cold-blooded, unempathic, and unkind treatment.
To measure empathy in adults, the ARC devised a questionnaire — the Empathy Quotient (EQ) — that resembles the Autism Quotient. Overall, women score higher on the EQ than do men. Autistics, male and female, score lower than typical people.
The team at the ARC compared and cont
rasted empathy with the complementary trait of ‘systemisation’, which is the analysis of systems in search of the underlying canons that govern them. They confirmed that the average male brain is better at understanding and constructing systems and less empathic. The average female brain, is, by contrast, less good at systemising and is more social and more empathic. People with autism, both male and female, likewise show a stronger interest in systems, a predilection that had been noted from the earliest days. Systems might be mechanical, like the car engine, they might be natural, like the weather, or organisational, like a library. People with autism, along with scientists, love to systemise.
The way autistics see the world and process information resembles the way in which scientists routinely think. This does not mean that autistics do better in science exams or become scientists. It is more to do with the way they look at the world. Science questions, like philosophy questions, are often childishly simple: Why is ice slippery? Why is there something and not nothing? Why did that apple fall downwards? Such apparently naive questions can quickly lead to complex answers about the deep nature of reality.
Autistics, including Aspergers, commonly like things to be highly structured and neatly categorised, and can become fascinated by patterns and the underlying rules that govern systems. The autistic mind is one, says Simon Baron-Cohen, which is striving ‘to set aside the temporal dimension in order to see — in stark relief — the eternal repeating patterns in nature’.
The ARC team tried to give a united explanation of the two essential, but different, autistic traits — the social and communication difficulties (empathy problems) and the narrow interests and attention to detail (systemising and analytical aptitude). They called their idea the empathising–systemising (E–S) theory. Their method allows everybody who completes a questionnaire — whether autistic or not — to be plotted as a dot somewhere on a scatter plot, based on their combination of systemising and empathising characteristics.
SOURCE: AUTISM RESEARCH CENTRE
Along the vertical axis is empathy, which goes from -3 to +3. Zero is the average for the population. Above zero you are better than average at reading thoughts and feelings and responding with appropriate emotion. Below zero you have increasing problems. The horizontal axis represents systemising. To the right of zero you are better than average at understanding and creating systems. To the left of zero you are decreasingly good. The idea of this simple graph is that everybody falls somewhere in the space.
As expected, the results show that more women than men fall in the top, narrow diagonal strip (Type E: empathising), their empathy tending to be greater than their systemising. In the pale wide diagonal across the centre (Type B: balanced), subjects are equally good, or bad, with empathy and with systems. The lowermost diagonal strip (Type S: systemising) is where more men fall, with systemising ability generally higher than empathising.
The expectation was that autistic people, who are naturally drawn to the predicable systemised world rather than the ‘less lawful’ and unpredictable world of people, would fall somewhere in the lower-right corner of the bottom-right triangle, with systemising anywhere from average to above average, but empathy at less than minus one and consequent problems with human relationships. And so it proved. Male and female autistics clustered in this part of the diagram (Extreme Type S).
Although there has been criticism of the E–S theory from various quarters, the diagram surely confirms what everybody already knew — that many more web developers and sewer engineers are men, and more nursery school teachers and receptionists are women. Is it any wonder that in jobs such as nursing, waiting on tables, and serving passengers in aeroplanes, where empathy is a basic essential, it is mainly women who are employed? In experiments, female monkeys prefer to play with dolls than with toy trains, while male monkeys do the opposite. So it’s not (merely) a question of gender stereotyping. Simon Baron-Cohen says it should come as no surprise, since males and females differ below the neck, that we should find some differences above the neck too.
This is not to say that nature has everything and nurture nothing to do with the work we all end up doing, or that there isn’t still a strong bias in some places, including the home, towards the idea that boys and men ought to do certain things only, and girls and women others.
In 2015 an English biochemist named Tim Hunt told a conference about his trouble with allowing ‘girls’ to be in the same science lab as men. He said: ‘You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.’ This attitude was angrily denounced by a few, though most people I spoke to, men and women alike, just laughed. Amusement is the proper response to such muttonheaded dottiness.
Unhappily, the whole area of sexual differences in career choice is emotionally fraught, and our understanding of the complexities of why we do what we do, is still in its infancy. We do know, however, that men tend to be more solitary, terser, more systematically and mechanically minded, and more inclined to try to solve their own problems. More men than women kill themselves, and more men have Asperger’s diagnoses.
But, though there are more male autistics than female, this is not essentially a matter of sex. In fact, the E–S theory is a better predictor than your genitals of whether you will choose to study STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). What has been positively selected in evolutionary terms, Simon Baron-Cohen believes, is not autism itself, but an aptitude for understanding or building systems, including mathematics.
He explored the idea of a link between autism and ‘maleness’ in what he has termed ‘the extreme male brain theory’ of autism, for which he says there are biological reasons. Brain differences are apparent from the earliest days, and there is evidence, he believes, that the seeds are sown before birth.
Males produce twice as much testosterone as females, and it is high levels of testosterone in the womb, he says, not whether you are male or female, which seems to be related to autism and scientific talent alike; testosterone present in the foetus shapes brain development and plays a role also in influencing both empathising and systemising. Whether you are male or female, elevated levels of pre-natal testosterone are associated with more autistic traits, including a greater interest in systems and less eye contact at the age of one. Babies who stare much more at a geometric mobile than at a human face tend to go on to develop autism.
Although the extreme male brain theory is a persuasive way of looking at the place of the complementary traits of sytemising and empathising in autistics and society as a whole, it has not gone down well with feminist critics, some of whom point out that a more pertinent example of a person with an extreme male brain would be a football hooligan. But this is just jolly wordplay.
Psychologist Professor Cordelia Fine is a member of something called the NeuroGenderings Network, described as ‘a transdisciplinary network of “neurofeminist” scholars who aim to critically examine neuroscientific knowledge production and to develop differentiated approaches for a more gender-adequate neuroscientific research’. Fine referred to Baron-Cohen’s findings as an example of ‘neurosexism’. I’m not sure what ‘knowledge production’ is, but if Professor Fine doesn’t believe that women and girls are self-evidently more sociable than men and boys I think she should get out more.
The National Autistic Society’s Lorna Wing Centre for Autism says it has seen a steady increase in the number of girls and women referred for diagnosis, which, it says, suggests a historic bias towards men and boys in the criteria that are used. Whether this is a male-chauvinist-pig bias by a lot of sexist autism specialists who won’t allow women to join their gentlemen’s club, or the sort of bias that means more men than women get testicle cancer, who can say? Whatever the case, there just are significantly more male autistics diagnosed than female. How many woman trainspotters do you know? This does not mean, however, that more work should not be done to identify and help those many
autistic girls and women who have been, and continue to be, missed.
The ‘extreme male brain’ type is present not only in computer nerds and cartographers, it also extends to such systems as languages, medicine, and politics, which is highly systematic, being a system of administrative and organisational rules resting on an underlying system of beliefs and moral principles.
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In the latter half of the twentieth century, two English politicians, who were both, probably not coincidentally, members of ‘the awkward squad’ showed clear traits of Asperger’s syndrome.
For half a century, between 1950 and 2001, Tony Benn (1925–2014) was a Labour Member of Parliament. Among the government jobs he held were Postmaster General, and Minister of Technology.
In 1960, on the death of his father Lord Stansgate, Benn inherited a peerage he didn’t want because it disallowed him from continuing as an MP. He successfully campaigned to renounce the title and got the law changed so that he could carry on in the House of Commons.
In typical Asperger style, Tony Benn’s personal, political, and moral convictions were deeply held, and he said that he had ‘a very strong sense of right and wrong’. One of his repeated dictums was that you should say what you mean and mean what you say, and he explained that he would not want to be in politics if he was dancing to somebody else’s tune. He stuck to his opinions through thick and thin, telling Socialist Review in 2007: ‘I would be ashamed if I thought I’d ever said anything I didn’t believe to get on.’
Benn was completely unimpressed by authority, for which he had a profound distaste. At the age of five or six he was taken out of Bible class for interjecting his own opinions. Interference incensed him and he had ‘a deep suspicion of being bullied and lectured and harassed … by people who claim to have some authority over you’. Once wanting to smoke his pipe on a train he peeled the no-smoking sticker off the window in an act of civil disobedience and personal fury.
