What is Aspergers Disorder?
Individuals diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder exhibit impairments in social interaction, including impairments in the use of nonverbal behaviors such as eye contact, facial expressions, body language, and social gestures. They may fail to develop peer relationships appropriate to their developmental level. They often lack spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people, and do not engage in social or emotional reciprocity. Often, they display restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities. Frequently, this is displayed through a persistent preoccupation with a topic or object of interest and/or excessive adherence to routines. In the case of Asperger’s Disorder, there is no clinically significant general delay in language and there is no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of age-appropriate self-help skills, adaptive behavior (other than in social interaction), or curi
Asperger’s Disorder is a milder variant of Autistic Disorder. Both Asperger’s Disorder and Autistic Disorder are in fact subgroups of a larger diagnostic category. This larger category is called either Autistic Spectrum Disorders, mostly in European countries, or Pervasive Developmental Disorders (“PDD”), in the United States. In Asperger’s Disorder, affected individuals are characterized by social isolation and eccentric behavior in childhood. There are impairments in two-sided social interaction and non-verbal communication. Though grammatical, their speech may sound peculiar due to abnormalities of inflection and a repetitive pattern. Clumsiness may be prominent both in their articulation and gross motor behavior. They usually have a circumscribed area of interest which usually leaves no space for more age appropriate, common interests. Some examples are cars, trains, French Literature, door knobs, hinges, cappucino, meteorology, astronomy or history. The name “Asperger” comes from
