Autism and Development Disorders Essay

This article was based on research done on children ages three to ten years around the temperament and reactions of children with Autism. It discusses the differences between those with Autism, and those without autism, specifically how they react, perceive, and overcome certain developmental musts in childhood. These results are taken from the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire, which present the sixteen dimensions of child perceptions, which includes activity level, anger and frustration, approach and withdrawal, and problems focusing. These are only a few behaviors they suggest help distinguish between children, as well as the different reactions that may suggest Autism is present in a child. This article then discusses how they went about testing the groups of different children. They had one group as a control, kids that had previously been tested on the Child Autism Rating Scale and proved negatively to having Autism, and a group of kids that when previously tested, prove d positive for Autism. They wanted to see how the Affect Regulation, and temperament varied between the groups. To test this Konstantareas and Stewart gathered a test group of nineteen children all with previous proven forms of Autism and tested them with a created Demographic Questionnaire. In this questionnaire it asks what rating a child received on the Child Autism Rating Scale, as well as investigating the income bracket in which each family would be placed, as well as an additional examination to figure out the child’s level of cognitive functioning. Testing what Kostantareas and Stewart call the DP II which is a rating for children from birth to age nine, tapping into stills in five areas of functioning, including physical, self-help, social, academic, and communication. After all of the data was collected all of the children with Autism Spectrum were combined and used to determine if they had Affect Regulation. The results indicated that the children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) were more likely to employ their lower level of  AR strategies, such as trying to hide an ob ject or keep in longer, rather than to ask if they could keep the object or immediately return it to the experimenter. This experiment also suggests that those diagnosed with ASD performed worse than the control group without ASD, suggesting those with Autism perform at a lower standard than those without. After reading this article and gathering all the information, I’ve formed my own ideas on Konstantareas and Stewart’s findings. In their later analysis on what they found, they suggest that children with ASD develop slower, and are found to be less competent than those who don’t. I feel there was flaw in this testing, instead of comparing these ASD patients with a control group they should be compared to others with ASD in different settings. This study suggests some limitations posed by the collecting of data, including assumptions made based on previous research, and the flawed collection places could’ve resulted in skewed findings. They collected this information over the phone via the parents in a control room setting. Other contributors in this study suggest that pe rhaps a more accurate way to measure a child’s AR would be in a less controlled setting such as school, or home. This would help with the data collected to be more accurate because the tested children would be more comfortable in their environment, and may perform better in a comfortable place. Which I agree with, the only way to see how a child truly acts, and reacts to certain problems is to see them in the environment they’re used to, children are susceptible and can be swayed easily by something they see in a control room setting. In this article it suggests that cognitive development is solely linked to AR, which I think is false. To say that Affect Regulation is the only way to successfully measure a child’s growth is an inaccurate way to think, I think however that a child’s growth is measured by a number of things not just how they measure on a scale of AR. This article also suggests that moderating temperament scales is a way to better measure children with and without ASD. I disagree completely and feel the only way to receive accurate results in the measurement o f a child’s temperament is to alter how the results overall were collected, not the scale they were measured on. This change should show these ASD children individually instead of lumping them together in a sample on a scale. The final thing this article suggests is creating some comparisons in and between subgroups, limiting factors to subcategories and  trends from within the group as a whole, once again not representing the individuals but a group of similar ASD children, no exceptions accounted for. There are a few things about this article I agree with. It suggests that children’s feelings for determining ASD cannot be properly measured by interviews, because children with ASD do not regularly show feelings, and when they do express them in a very different way than those without ASD. It suggests that a new study should be done to show the â€Å"true temperament† (pg. 10) of the kids in order to achieve the most accurate results. These researchers should find children with ASD that have both extremely severe cases, and those with more mild cases, test them against each other, and compare them to the differences of those without any form of ASD. If done this suggested way they would predict to the greatest ability how AR exists in ASD children, and in what ways it hindered them performing everyday activities. In many ways ASD affects children with Autism’s AR and temperament. Correct and effective ways to measure these in diagnosed children must be done in order to see what disabilities they may have in performing tasks later on in everyday life.