On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Beth Benoit replied: > A young cousin of my husband is autistic < snip> > As a result [of fund-raising], I have met many, many parents > of autistic children. While I can't say that they are all > peculiar or autistic-like (and certainly know > better, after my years on TIPS, to ever make a statement like that based > only on my own observations and not carefully conducted research), I have > long held that there seem to be an awful lot of them who are a bit peculiar. > > Is it hindsight that causes me to predispose my judgment toward looking at > these beleaguered parents through the prism of a "personality defect" > microscope? Perhaps, but I don't think so. > > It could even be argued that years of having to deal with the very specific > needs of an autistic child would be enough to create a rather odd > personality. But still I don't think so. > > The problem, of course, may be trying to measure "oddness." And worse, > trying to quantify it. Goes to the heart of the difficulty that psychology > often has of being able to be scientific about something as nebulous as > behavior. All good and thoughtful points, so I thought some more about this issue. Kanner had provided some striking observations (see Rimland, 1964 for a good summary) indicating that the parents of his patients were highly-accomplished, upper-class intellectuals, and also peculiar and "limited in genuine interest in people" (Kanner, 1943). Although he favoured a genetic explanation, as I said in my previous post, these vivid descriptions encouraged the pernicious "blame the parent" view of the causation of autism, such as that of the now notorious Bruno Bettelheim (and I'm going to spell his name right for once!). Since the proponents of the psychogenic view had nothing but anecdotes, others attempted to obtain real evidence. Two particular questions were: (1) Do the parents have higher socioeconomic status than others? (2) Do they have unusual personality characteristics? On the first question, the (old) papers in my file suggest that the question is open, or possibly yes. My best source was Sanua (1987), who said in his abstract "It is suggested that the question of upper SES of parents of autistic children is still open" but at the end of his paper concluded more strongly "Genuinely autistic children have parents who tend to be of higher socioeconomic status than the parents in the general population". I've got to say (although, like Beth, I caution that this is merely anecdote) that I have myself been impressed with the frequency with which parents of autistic children have published books on autism, both professional and first-person accounts. Of course, even if this were quantified relative to some other disorder, we wouldn't know if it was because autism particularly evokes a literary response, or whether it's due to an innate intellectual capability of the parents. On my question (2) the answer seems to be no, based on a study by Koegel et al (1983) using a battery of tests, including the MMPI. They concluded "These results are all counter to the concept of any general psychological characteristics for parents of autistic children with respect to either a parental cause of the disorder or with respect to a general stress reaction to the disorder". So Kanner's striking observations can be dismissed as due to selection bias. Yet we now know that autism is a strongly genetic disorder. For example, McGuffin (2001, citing Plomin, 2001) gives a figure showing heritability of something like 0.9 with a zero shared environment component. With such a strong genetic effect, it seems entirely possible that some trace of it might be evident in the parents and relatives, as Beth suggests. The Koegel study I cited was from an earlier era when it was important to discredit the psychogenic hypothesis. Possibly there may have been some demand-characteristic pressure to conclude no difference and to overlook subtle effects. So I went looking on PubMed for more recent studies on parental characteristics in autism. On IQ, I found Fombonne et al (1997), who reported "higher mean verbal IQ scores... [and] no consistent differences...on performance scales, reading, and spelling tests" On personality, I found Murphy et al (2000). They say "there was significantly increased expression of the traits anxious, impulsive, aloof, shy, over-sensitive, irritable and eccentric among the autism relatives". An earlier study by Piven et al (1997) of families with _two_ autistic children had also reported "rigidity, aloofness, hypersensitivity to criticism, and anxiousness, speech and pragmatic language deficits, and more limited friendships". Finally, Hughes et al (1997) reported that parents of autistic children show "good memory, but relatively poor planning skills and attentional flexibility [which they call "executive function"]. All-in-all, I'd say that these results are reminiscent of what Kanner reported back in the 1940's, and what Beth has observed. Of course, these characteristics might be used to argue in favour of psychogenesis again. But if Plomin's statistic of high hereditability and zero shared environment effect hold up (as I expect they will), the much more likely conclusion is that they indicate the effect of genes. -Stephen References Fombonne, E. et al (1997). A family study of autism: cognitive patterns and levels in parents and siblings. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 38, 667-83. Hughes, C. et al (1997). Executive function in parents of children with autism. Psychological Medicine, 27, 209-20. Koegel, R. et al (1983). The personality and family-interaction characteristics of parents of autistic children. Journal of Counselling and Clinical Psychology, 51, 683-692. McGuffin, P. et al (2001). Towards behavioral genomics. Science, 291, 1232-- Murphy, M. et al (2000). Personality traits of the relatives of autistic probands. Psychological Medicine, 30, 411-24. Piven, J., et al (1997). Personality and language characteristics in parents from multiple-incidence autism families. American Journal of Medical Genetics, 74, 398-411. Sanua, V. (1987). Infantile autism and parental socioeconomic status: a case of bimodal distribution. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 17, 189-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stephen Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Department web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy Check out TIPS listserv for teachers of psychology at: http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/psyc/southerly/tips/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
