An internationally-renowned autism researcher has received this year’s British Psychological Society Presidents’ Award. Professor Francesca Happé (King’s College London) has led seminal work on the neurocognitive causes of social impairments in autism and more recently has...
autism
I was saddened to see the letter from Cross and Atherton. This was one of many recent articles from various outlets to take issue with the concept of neurodiversity. Only, the concept as...
Autism: A new introduction to psychological theory and current debate, 2nd Edition by Sue Fletcher-Watson and Francesca Happé, published by Routledge is...
The neurodiversity movement posits that autism research, dominated by a deficit model, has for decades failed to improve lives. The movement advocates for an alternative model in which autistic stakeholders have a say in research initiatives, rather than being present as mere...
In recent years there has been an exponential rise in the amount of autism research undertaken, yet much of the narrative has been at odds with voices from the autistic community following the ‘neurodiversity paradigm’ which could loosely be described as applying a social (or...
I agree with Professor Rita Jordan (August 2019) that the double empathy problem leads to biases in interpreting behaviour. Carers may have feelings of inadequacy from...
You don’t have to look far to find derogatory descriptions of the communication of autistic people. Terms such as ‘disorder’, ‘impairment’, ‘deficit’ and ‘dysfunction’ abound in the research literature which, when you drill down into it, offers multitudes of negative...
New technology, including virtual reality, will be at the heart of a new lab to explore developmental disorders in Toddlers. The Wohl Wolfson ToddlerLab, based at Birkbeck, University of London, will see children from 18 months to four years have their brain activity...
Changing the Face of Autism Research Together is an arts collaboration between Dr Kinga Bercsenyi, a molecular biologist at Kings’ College London; artist Mario Ruiz Sorube; and podcaster and digital artist, Jon Adams. They teamed up with 21 autism researchers, clinicians,...
Autism is still widely seen as mysterious – so much so that the most widely recognised symbol of it (unpopular in the autistic community) is a puzzle piece. Various psychological theories of autism haven’t helped all that much, largely because all of the most...