It might be that there is a base level of activity among women devoted to ‘camouflaging’ normal irritation, impatience, and boredom which is largely absent in men, a baseline against which the findings for people with autism should properly be assessed. It is plausible (isn’t it?) that even among typical average people, women devote more effort to social signals, listening and responding, laughing politely at jokes, and so on. One thing that surely needs to be taken into account is the possibility that accommodating social pressures is something women do more of anyway. It does not eliminate the tricky gender issues, though. The research is obviously welcome because it might help improve diagnosis rates for women, but also because a more equal rate of autism for men and women perhaps helps to dispel the idea, formerly popular but (to me at least) rather unpalatable, that autism is really little more than typical male behaviour exaggerated to unacceptable levels. I think in fact it’s possible the results are understated all of the subjects were people who had already been diagnosed with autism that criterion may have selected women who were atypically low in the level of camouflaging, precisely because women who do a lot of camouflaging would be more likely to escape diagnosis. The ratio between the two scores yields a measure of how much camouflaging is going on, and in brief the results confirm that camouflaging is present to a far greater degree in women. Putting it crudely, they measure what you actually do and what you’d like to do respectively. While the former assesses ‘external’ qualities such as behaviour, the latter measures ‘internal’ ones. The research team used scanning and other approaches, but their main tool was to contrast two different well-established methods of assessing autism – the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule on the one hand and the Autism Spectrum Quotient on the other. Now a study reported in the invaluable BPS Research Digest claims to have pulled it off. Measuring the level of camouflaging – which is obviously intended to be undetectable – obviously raises some methodological challenges. Camouflaging, on this view, requires significant intellectual resources and continuous effort, so that while camouflaged sufferers may lead apparently normal lives, they are likely to suffer other symptoms arising from the sheer mental effort they have to put in – fatigue, depression, and so on. There’s a subtle distinction here between doing what comes naturally and doing what you’ve learned to do. But surely, that’s just what normal people do? If you can learn these behaviours, doesn’t that mean you’re not autistic any more? ‘Camouflaging’ means learning normal social behaviours such as giving others appropriate eye contact, interpreting and using appropriate facial expressions, and so on. How can that be? It is hypothesised that some sufferers are able to ‘camouflage’ the symptoms of their autism, and that this suppression of symptoms is particularly prevalent among women. Recently, though it has been suggested that the gender gap is not as great as it seems it’s just that most women with autism go undiagnosed. Traditionally, autism has been regarded as an overwhelmingly male condition. Soldiers wear uniforms with the familiar green and brown camouflage patterns to blend into foliage during the day, but under low light and at night, they're still vulnerable to infrared detection, you can draw inspiration from natural systems that have been perfected over millions of years, giving us ideas we might never have been able to come up with otherwise.Does recent research into autism suggest real differences between male and female handling of consciousness? Opportunity costs are low, global competitors don't closely track the market, so you can camouflage what you're doing, if something is missing, you can understand why and change it before taking it to the main market. We tried a few different combinations but chose these flavors because they complement each other so well. We are having a little fun with this flavor, you see the camo design on everything these days, so we thought why not create an ice cream flavor that looks camouflage ? The best part is these three flavors taste great together. We are used to the new situation, we camouflage headquarters, and cars, and dig trenches. Yesterday there was a big Russian air strike, but we organized ourselves, with the rest of the factions. We camouflage headquarters, and cars, and dig trenches.
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