Children the Challenge Blog

Autism and the development of thinking

2011-01-10T13:09:00.000-08:00

Peter Hobson

From Interpersonally Situated Cognition (2008)

Cognition, conation, and affect – thoughts, motivations, and feelings.

The development of thinking: Thinking emerges out of relations with the world that have cognitive, affective, and conative aspects. Interpersonal relations have a special importance for explaining how this emergence takes place.

Martin Buber – In the beginning is relation. There is a contrast between I-Thou and I-It relations.

The developmental trajectory of early forms of relatedness:

The question is: how do those developments take place? Hobson thinks that critical for the transition to thinking of self and other as discrete persons who live in a share world is the fact that from around 9 or 10 months of age, infants are moved in responding to the attitudes of others. The nature of this movement is what matters. Take the case of social referencing, where an infant is confronted with an emotionally ambiguous object or event (e.g., the visual cliff study). Infants look and then respond to the affective expression of the parent.

By the end of the first year, an infant registers (does not understand) that this shift in meaning occurs through other embodied persons. The infant is able to identify with the attitudes of others. So the world comes to have meaning according to oneself as identified with the other. Therefore (potentially at least) the world now has meaning according to oneself.

The infant begins to adopt the stance of the other toward his or her own attitudes – which is important for some form of self-awareness.

In all this the process of identifying with other people’s attitudes plays a pivotal role. In social referencing, the infant has a kind of double take on the object or event at the focus of attention. He or she has an initial way of apprehending the object or event. In addition, he or she responds to, assimilates, and (potentially) adopts the attitude of the other. The critical element in all of this is that in the child’s own experience some of the otherness of the other-person-anchored attitude is registered, even in infancy. Social referencing is but one example of what it means to identify with someone else’s attitudes. The important thing here is “identifying with.” This explains aspects of development that are otherwise difficult to explain. One reason it is so pivotal to human understanding is that it structures social experience with the polarities of self-other differentiations as well as connectedness. This is the case even though in the earliest phases of development, ‘self-other’ need to be understood not as discrete (and certainly not conceptualized_ elements, but rather as structured experience immanent in the experience of sharing.

The Case of Autism

There is substantial evidence that children with autism have impairments in recognizing and responding to other peoples emotional states, not merely understanding some mental-state term (Theory of the Mind). The onset of their limitations in joint attention and other kinds of person-with-person engagement occurs well before they could be expected to conceptualize minds. They are atypical in their relative lack of engaging in ‘sharing’ forms of joint attention and social referencing. It is the children’s limited engagement with other people’s attitudes, both in one-to one mutual exchanges and in person-person-world interactions such as those of joint attention and social referencing that we find the source of later deficits’ in interpersonal understanding.

Just what is it that is atypical about personal relatedness among people with autism? It is that although there is a heterogeneity in the sources of the disorder, the final common pathway to autism is a limitation in the children’s’ propensity to identify with the attitudes of others. (Hobson cites extensive research to show that the process of identification is not merely cognitive but also affective and conative In nature.)

To think about human beings’ state of mind and to adjust communication in relation to those states implicates feelings in relation to those others, ant it is also to be motivated (or moved) to act and communicate accordingly. A failure to grasp this fact is reflected within the literature on autism where researchers (e.g. Baron-Cohen) question whether children with autism suffer limitations in understanding or affect or motivation.

Symbolic Thinking
The arguments that Hobson has been making have relevance for all symbolic/conceptual thinking, not only thinking that apply to persons-with-minds. The central idea is that what become the relatively, but never wholly, separate components of thinking, feeling, and willing have their origins in aspects of relatedness between a human being and the personal and non-personal world. It is this that accounts for the connectedness between thoughts and what thoughts are about.

Vygotsky -- thoughts are distilled out of relations with the world that are affectively configured.

One could not think about self and others without symbols, but one cannot achieve the requisite ability to use symbols without the appropriate kind of differentiation between symbolic vehicles and their referents. Each entails a grasp of what it means to take an alternative person-anchored perspective on the shared world.

Symbolic play is an especially clear manifestation of children’s ability knowingly to apply alternative meaning to materials that do not usually have these meanings. There is substantial evidence that children with autism are limited in their creative representational play, especially in their spontaneous play.

Thinking is intricately linked to affect and motivation. Forms of thinking achieved by individual human beings may be acquired through affective-cum-motivated communicative transactions that are inter-individual in nature, as Vygotsky proposed long ago.

Next section from:
Foundations for Self-Awareness: An exploration through Autism by Hobson, Chidambi, Lee, and Meyer, 2006.

Summary of the final chapter VII. The Place of Self in Development.

How are children with autism atypical in self-other awareness, and how do they differ from other children without autism in the expression and understanding of social emotions?

Children and older individuals with autism show certain striking abnormalities in the qualities as well as the degree of their self-awareness.

Overview of results from the studies in this monograph: children with autism differ from matched children in four ways.

THE DEVELOPMENT ND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF SELF

The development of self-awareness is critical for the growth of several abilities in early childhood – perhaps most prominently, symbolizing in play and aspects of language, Theory of Mind, and executive functioning – impairments which are characteristic of autism. What makes autism “autism” is a systemic disorder of self-in-relation-to-other. The nature of the disorder depends on the functional implications of a relative lack of the propensity to identify with others. This impairment may have a variety of sources. According to Hobson, the intersubjective impairment is the sine qua non for autism, a final common pathway in the pathogenesis of the syndrome. Children with autism are impaired in identifying with others. What they share in common is a disability in a basic and developmentally vital process that renders human-style intersubjective engagement.

The Nature of Self

To conceptualize the self is to conceptualize other selves: concepts of self and others are logically intertwined. In order to acquire concepts of self and the other, one needs to have a grasp of the kinds of relations that are fitting between selves and other selves. If one had no experience of these kinds of personal relations, and for example always perceived persons as pieces of furniture, then one could not derive concepts of self and other, because it is part of what we understand selves to be, that they engage in personal forms of self-other relations. If one had only a partial experience of the appropriate kinds of relation, one would acquire only a partial concept of self. This is relevant for interpreting the evidence that children with autism may have not only a thin notion of self, but also limited notions of concern, guilt, embarrassment, and so on. If one’s experience of personal relatedness is restricted, this places a limit on what conceptual understanding of persons, selves, and social emotions can be achieved.

What kinds of relation are required for understanding what it means to be a self in relation to other selves? There needs to be a means by which one person apprehends the subjective life of other people directly rather than through a process of inference; and there need to be public and interpretable expressions of at least some mental states, in order for us to come to discriminate particular states in ourselves and others.

Noninferential empathy, the direct perception and affective responsiveness to the bodily affective expressions of others, is a principal mode of intersubjective communication.

Individuals with autism seem to have some concept of self and some capacity to acquire self-reflection, and yet their concepts of self and their range of self-directed attitudes are limited. Only certain dissociable lines of development to the typical development of self seem to be affected in autism, They include: intersubjective engagement, social referencing, symbolizing, executive functioning, the so-called Theory of Mind, and most importantly the ability to identity with others.

Intersubjective Engagement
At the most basic level there seems to be a developmental dissociation that corresponds with what Buber called I-Thou and I-It relations and what Neisser termed ecological and interpersonal selves. Children with autism are relatively adept in their transactions with the non-personal world. By contrast their intersubjective relations are profoundly compromised. But this picture is too crude. The dissociations are more fine grained as Hobson’s research shows. In the case of imitation, there is a dissociation between the ability to copy goal-directed actions and the propensity to identify with the person whose actions those are, and thereby assume the other person’s physically grounded orientation-in-attitudes. In the case of responding to attitudes, there appears to be a dissociation between being affected by expressions of feeling in others in a rather ill focused manner, and being affected (through identification) by the other person’s feelings as the feeling of another self with whom one is engaged.

The Role of Identification in Development
Identification is what makes human intersubjectivity what it is – unique in the animal kingdom for quality and intensity of interpersonal co-ordination as well as power for promoting social understanding and symbolic functioning. The limitations in this propensity/ability to identify with others are what account for the critical deficits in intersubjective engagement, among the majority of children with autism, and for the developmental sequelae that ensue for joint attention, symbolic functioning, aspects of language, and much else besides.

The process of identification is postulated to configure forms of self-other interaction in which the self not only responds to another individual’s bodily-expressed orientation from that other person’s stance but also assimilates that orientation so that it becomes a possible mode of relating for the self. Infant style episodes of affective sharing are considered to have a dyadic structure in which the child experiences such events essentially linked with a special kind of thing in the world, namely the other person with whom sharing is occurring (but not conceptualized s such yet). It is critical for the developments in social understanding that the infant should register the shift as a shift across perspective, not merely as a change in the meaning of objects at the focus of referencing.

Identification is cognitive (since it categorizes persons and things). Identification is affective (since it coordinates affective attitudes of self and other). Identification is motivational in nature (since the propensity is posited to engage the individual with the bodily expressed psychological orientation of another). Identification is person centered. For example, to identify with someone’s fear is to feel something of his or her fear, not simply to be afraid oneself.

The process of identifying-with introduces structure to self-other relatedness. This relatedness has a special quality, most simply expressed in terms of sharing of experiences. Identification is an emotional process with its own developmental timetable. For example, from the end of the first year of life infants can identify with someone else’s attitudes towards objects and events. This leads to a later phase, beginning around the middle of the second year of life, when infants achieve new ways of identifying with through newly acquired concepts of self and other.
Identification is transformational for the individual’s relations with the world, both social and non-social.

Structures of self/other awareness are prerequisites for, and not merely the products of, concepts of self and other. In the case of autism, the absence of some but not all of these forms of such experience, appears to have a range of social and cognitive sequelae.

Here is one way of expressing a central tenet of Hobson’s argument: emotional relations have a structure that delivers meanings, and need not be derived from those meaning, and a fortiori, not from those meanings-as-conceptualized. A range of meanings (including those of self and other) may be conceptualized in virtue of an individual’s experience of modes of relatedness that are constitutive of social emotions.

Children with autism have a relative dearth of engagement with other people’s feelings as located in the other people and of importance for themselves in one way or another. This importance might either take the form of concern for the other, or for themselves in the eye of the other, or indeed for what the world means for the other and therefore what it might mean for the self.

There are now several strands of evidence to suggest that from early in life, children with autism are impaired in their one-to-one intersubjective engagement with others; subsequently they are limited in their empathy towards others, and in their propensity to engage in sharing (protodeclarative) acts and gestures; and now there is growing evidence that they are less likely to manifest those forms of social emotion (such as aspects of guilt and coyness) that implicate potentially reciprocal and mutual interpersonal relations.

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One of the results of the limitations in self-awareness and self-relatedness is how it affects autobiographical or episodic memory. Bowler has more recent research on this in his two books: Memory in Autism and Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Can a person experience him or herself as having experienced this or that event if they only have limited have self-awareness or self-relatedness? Bowler finds evidence for such a memory impairment in individuals with autism. Hobson had an interesting phenomenon in one of his studies (Lee and Hobson 1998). At the time he did not understand it but commented on it. Several of the subjects with autism but none of those without recalled events from their birth. These “memories” had the same qualities as other events there were reporting about themselves. If people with autism have a difficulty distinguishing between what is recalled as a personal memory and what is recalled as a fact, then no wonder they report items of knowledge as if they were remembrances. If this is so, then it raises the question of the status of their personal memories. In Hobson’s view, to have remembrance is to identify with oneself in the past, and this means assuming at least something of the affective stance that one occupied at the time. It is uncertain how far this is something that many individuals with autism can accomplish.

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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Autism is a syndrome, a constellation of clinical features that co-occur. Those features include impairment in social interaction and communication, in creative symbolic play and perspective-sensitive thought and language. Children with autism have abnormalities in both non-verbal/emotional and linguistic communications with other people, over and above any difficulties associated with general learning disabilities. They are also limited in their understanding of minds. There is a common developmental thread that links various features of the syndrome, one that originates in the children’s relative lack of personal relatedness towards other people. That thread is the children’s failure to engage in emotionally patterned and mutually coordinated self-other relations, configured by the process of identifying with others.

Children with autism have impairments in affective contact with others that are manifest not only in the degree of their involvement with other individuals’ feelings per se (e.g., in heir relative lack of empathy and guilt), or in the lack of engagement with others’ engagement with themselves (as in the case of coyness, or in being relatively oblivious to others’ investment in their achievements), but also others’ attitude to a shared world (e.g., I social referencing). The evidence that children with autism rarely imitate self/other-oriented or stylistic aspects of actions add force to the proposal that the children are not moved to adopt the person-anchored orientations of other people, as such orientations are bodily expressed in feeling and action. This compromises their propensity to adopt and conceptualize person-anchored perspectives. Their difficulty in acquiring anything but limited concepts of self and other as persons who have distinct but coordinated attitudes towards the world limits their ability knowingly to engage in creative symbolic play, as well as their Theory of Mind.

To conclude: the evidence suggests that children with autism do suffer impoverished experiences of self-in-relation-to-other, and that this has important consequences both for their awareness of self and their potential for having social emotions such as guilt or coyness. The very same evidence points to the richness and complexity of the development of self-awareness in typical development and highlights its social-relational underpinnings.

ASD unraveling the enigma part 1

2010-04-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

Uta Frith wrote a wonderful book in 1989 entitled “Autism Explaining the Enigma.” She published a second edition in 2003. She basically reviewed three theories that accounted for some aspects of ASD: theory of mind, weak central coherence, and impaired executive functioning. At the very end of the book she offered some ideas on possible connections between the three. She believes that all three theories implicate thinking processes that have something to do with self-consciousness. These are all due to neurologically-based cognitive deficits.

Nancy Minchew, continuing down the cognitive deficit path, thinks that a complex information processing model best explains ASD. She believes that the higher order neural system is under-developed leading to cognitive deficits in complex sensory, complex motor, complex memory, complex language, and concept formation. Intact areas include simple memory, formal language, rule learning, visual spatial processing, elementary motor, and sensory perception.

On the other hand as I wrote in my last blog (reflecting the work of Peter Hobson in England) ASD can be viewed as primarily an affective disorder -- people with ASD do not engage in affectively charged interactions with other people. They are lacking in self-other awareness.

Michael Tomaselo in his 2003 book entitled “Constructing a Language” identifies two important sets of human skills that are important for language acquisition: intention-reading and pattern-finding. Intention-reading includes such things as the ability to share attention with others, the ability to follow attention and gesturing of others to objects, the ability to actively direct the attention of others to objects by pointing and gesturing, and the ability to imitatively learn the intentional actions of others. Pattern-finding is the ability to form perceptual and conceptual categories based on the principle of sameness and the ability engage in relational thinking as epitomized by the use of analogies and metaphors. In other words processing information about relations between relations and not just judgements about same and different.

The enigma of ASD can thus be explained not by either affect or cognition weakness but by deficits in both areas. As such instruction needs to focus on teaching both intention-reading and pattern-finding skills. This is where the search will continue in future blogs -- further explicating the theory and research behind a dual pronged approach and delineating a scope and sequence that would address both areas.

Affective disorder continued

2010-01-21T10:59:00.000-08:00

What do I mean when I say that ASD is primarily an affective disorder? There are of course problems with cognition – many autistic people find it difficult to perceive the mental states of others (Theory of the Mind); people with autism have problems with seeing the whole picture (Weak Central Coherence); and they also have problems planning, organizing, monitoring progress toward goals, and approaching problem solving in a flexible manner (Deficient Executive Functioning). The research of Peter Hobson sees these as secondary conditions that arise from impairment in the emotional aspects of interpersonal relatedness.

The tools of complex thinking (what Vygotsky calls the higher mental functions) are constructed when the infant is emotionally engaged with other people. Social engagement provides the foundation for both thinking and language.

Kanner’s early formulation was right on the mark (too bad he modified it later and came up with the term “refrigerator mother’). He labeled what he saw in eleven children in his first paper as “autistic disturbance of affective (i.e. emotional) contact”.

ASD is first and foremost an impairment in the emotional aspects of interpersonal relatedness. The Kaufman’s in their book “Son-Rise” were on the right track. Research is now validating much of their early work. The place to start when working with children (or adults with ASD for that matter) is with their lack of interpersonal relatedness at the emotional level. Many programs target the cognitive level and this frequently results in just simply teaching them some rote rules of social behavior.

ASD primarily as an affective disorder

2010-01-13T09:38:00.000-08:00

The parents of a child on the autism spectrum frequently wonder -- what can I do to help my child grow and develop. They turn to professionals, other parents, and frequently web sites for advice. And what a plethora of advice there is out there. “This diet will cure your child.” “Don’t vaccinate.” “The only program that works is ABA”. or “ABA turns your child into a robot.” So many different therapies, so much different advice. What is a parent to do? Who do they listen to?

Most of the research favors Applied Behavior Analysis although there is a tantalizing bit of research that is now merging behavioral and developmental approaches (e.g., The Denver Model). What I will do in this and subsequent blogs is just share my latest thinking on an idea -- the idea that ASD is primarily an affective disturbance and the cognitive dysfunctions are secondary to this.

I believe that the starting place is in developing self and other awareness. First develop an emotional (affective) connection and then start the cognitive skill development part.

My thoughts are based on research that I will later share in more detail -- primarily the works of Peter Hobson and Michael Tomesello but also numerous others.
My thoughts are also based on two programs with weak research bases -- Relationship Development Intervention and the Son Rise program -- both have some very good ideas and both have limitations.
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ASD is primarily a social impairment.

People with ASD do not engage in emotionally charged interactions with other people.
They lack the capacity to see other people as people like themselves.

Just because they lack this capacity does not mean it cannot be taught.

2009-03-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

Publications | Association for Contextual Behavioral Science

2008-04-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

Publications | Association for Contextual Behavioral Science

Striving for Perfection

2008-01-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

Adlerian Psychology – from “The Education of Children”

The fundamental fact in human development is the dynamic and purposive striving of the psyche. The ever present goal (unconscious) is to strive for greatness, perfection, and superiority.

The construction of our personality, its particular style and goal, is not built on objective reality but on the subjective view we take of the facts of life.

Style of life – line of action or pattern of behavior

This striving presupposes another important psychological fact – the feeling of inferiority. We attempt to dissipate this feeling of inferiority by bettering the situation. In other words we compensate (i.e., lessen this feeling). When we make psychological compensations, we open up the possibility of making mistakes.

There are three classes of children who manifest very clearly the development of compensatory traits: those who have weak or imperfect organs (a particularly Adlerian theme), those who have been treated with severity and no affection, and those who receive too much attention and pampering.

The sense of inferiority and striving for superiority are two phases of the fundamental fact in human life and are inseparable. In children we find inordinate ambition and an exaggerated sense of inferiority acting like a poison in the soul.

The important thing to look for is the degree of social feeling the individual manifests. Social feeling is the crucial and deciding factor in human development. Social feeling is the barometer of an individual’s normalcy.

Adlerian Theory and Self-Determination Theory

2006-10-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

A simple explanation – combining Adlerian and Self Determination
My oversimplification of a complex subject matter.

As children, we develop an overriding goal that guides our life. We all strive for completeness, perfection, and security. This is due to the fact that we have three (four) basic needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness and (safety?)
Deci and Ryan reject the safety/security need but accept it as a deficit motive – a compensatory strategy that one develops in response to basic need deficits. They say that people come to desire safety/security when they view events as threats to self. Maybe this is too reductionistic. If we follow their logic, all events can be viewed as threats to self – so why then do we need relatedness and competence? For example failure to meet the competence need could be viewed as a direct threat to our sense of self-efficacy, so it is in a way a threat to self. Four needs seem to make clinical sense and seem to be justified in the research literature.

Kefir has another way of looking at this and articulates four priorities and four impasses.

Priorities are what is thought and impasses are what is avoided.

Four main priorities in life (Kefir) are:

comfort,
pleasing,
control,
superiority.

These relate directly to each of the basic needs or motives:

safety,
relatedness,
autonomy, and
competence.

What we avoid is

stress/responsibility/expectations (comfort)[safety];
rejection (pleasing[relatedness]);
humiliation(control)[autonomy]; and
meaninglessness (superiority)[competence].

How we decide to meet these basic needs give rise to our overriding goal and our secondary goals. The pattern of behavior that we develop can be called our style of life or lifestyle. As children, our strivings may be frustrated in different ways. In order to compensate for these feelings of incompleteness and inferiority, we may develop unhealthy ways of meeting our needs. Many factors may influence how well our basic needs are met and how our lifestyle develops. These can be labeled as psychosocial factors and include our family atmosphere, parenting styles, sibling constellation, family and societal values, and our cultural, neighborhood, and school environments.

If our basic psychological needs are not met as young children, we will fail to thrive or will perish.

Through the process of socialization these four needs become goals or motives. Motives are derived from needs. Over time these goals (motives) become more refined and defined. The motivation or goal of relatedness may become the goal of having unfailing love from those around us (the pleasing priority); the competence motive may be articulated as being the best at whatever we attempt (the superiority priority); the goal of autonomy may become the thirst for power and control over others (the control priority); and the goal of safety may be actualized in the person who avoids stressful events and responsibilities (the comfort priority)

For example, a person may develop the final goal of being in control. Patterns of behavior that support this lifestyle may be that of perfectionism and emotional detachment. In order for this person to meet her needs, safety and mastery become crucial to her. This may lead her to become overly controlled (a variation of the autonomy need) and overly perfectionist (variation of the competence need) and guarded (variations of the safety and relatedness needs).
There are numerous personality styles that can be developed in our attempts to meet these four needs.

Adler listed four types, three unhealthy and one healthy:

the getting type,
the ruling type,
the avoiding type, and
the problem solving type.

These seem to be more related to basic motives and goals of behavior.

Mosak has developed an extensive listing of personality types. He does not show how they relate back to the basic needs. Kopp has taken Mosak’s typology and developed a categorization of style of striving for significance both with and without social interest.

Mosak’s typology

The victim
The martyr
The critic-judge
The know-it-all
The driver
The opposer
The controller
The getter
The pleaser
The moralizer
The excitement seekers
The babies
The feeling avoiders
Those who need to be good
The observer
The star
Annie Oakley
The survivor (Rocky)
The pole vaulter

There is no direct linkage between personality types and the four needs or priorities. For example: the getter. The getter may exploit, manipulate, intimidate, charm, or throw temper tantrums in order to get what he wants. What is this person’s dominant goal or priority? We don’t know from a listing of personality types. We need to discover the individual’s overriding goal first.

Now, each personality type is made of a number of behavior patterns. For example, the control person talked about earlier had developed the behavior patterns of perfectionism and detachment. Another example. The person who has an overriding priority of superiority may manifest the typology of the know-it all. Some possible patterns of behavior may be the use of criticism and constant arguing. Another person who is concerned about competence may become the super student. A person who is concerned about security may take on the role of victim. Behavior patterns the person exhibits may include whining, complaining, and pointing out disasters. Someone else who is concerned about security may become a procrastinator. But another procrastinating person may be driven more from a feeling of trying to avoid looking incompetent. So typologies are interesting in characterizing the general patterns of behavior that people develop but we need to look deeper to more fully understand what drives them.

What is an individual’s overriding goal and what are his/her core irrational beliefs?

It might be useful to develop a taxonomy of irrational beliefs based on distortions in attempting to meet the four needs:

1. Safety/Security/Comfort
a. The world is a dangerous place
b. Having money, home, things, etc. are most important.
c. I must avoid all stressful situations
d. I must avoid all of life’s difficulties.
e. I must not take on any responsibilities for my life
f. I must be careful in how I interact with other people.

2. Autonomy/ Control
a. Things must be the way I want them to be.
b. My past controls my life
c. Things outside of my life control me; I can do little about this.
d. I desperately need others to rely and depend on.
e. I must avoid looking ridiculous
f. I must control others; power is the key to happiness.

3. Competence/Superiority
a. I must succeed at whatever I do
b. I must not make mistakes
c. I can solve all problems, and I can’t stand it when I can’t.
d. I must be perfect.
e. I must avoid humiliation at all costs.
f. I must avoid feeling meaningless or insignificant.

4. Relatedness/Pleasing
a. I need love and approval from significant others
b. People must live by my moral code and when they do not do the right thing, they should be punished.
c. I should be upset when other people have problems, and feel sad when they are sad.
d. I will feel hurt and rejected if others are not pleased with me.
e. I must avoid rejection.