The Behavioral Manifestations of Autism Spectrum Disorders

The first documentations of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as a syndrome were made in the early 1940s, in parallel by a psychiatrist and a pediatrician in different countries. Leo Kanner (1943) described 11 children with social aloofness, insistence on sameness, and language delays or oddities. At about the same time, Hans Asperger (1944) described 4 children whom he called ‘little professors’ who showed social awkwardness and circumscribed interests, with intact abilities in vocabulary and syntactic aspects of language. Later, Frith (1989) compared these different descriptions of ASD, which have formed the base for conceptualizations of ASD until now. Due to the influence of psychodynamic theories in the 1960s, many believed that autism, also known as a childhood form of schizophrenia, was caused by social EL deprivation and/or poor parenting (Bettelheim, 1967). However, even in the 1940s, both Kanner and Asperger recognized familial, and presumably genetic, qualities that they observed in children with ASD in the parents of their child-patients. These broader phenotypes, believed to run in families, are being studied currently but it was not until the late 1960s that a number of clinical researchers began to question the psychodynamic approach, and suggested that ASD was a neurologically based disorder. In fact, researchers have found associations between autism and seizures, intellectual disability, language, and cognitive deficits arising from attentional difficulties and sensory and vestibular systems (Hermelin and O’Connor, 1970; Rimland, 1964; Rutter and Schopler, 1978). In addition, Folstein and Rutter’s (1978) twin study found much greater concordance for autism in monozygotic than dizygotic twins. However, identical twins with autism-related symptoms were NOT identical in ASD symptoms, providing important evidence for