Autism & Emotions

ASD ---> Autism Spectrum Disorder is a complex development disability. It's a neurological disorder that has an effect on normal brain function. ASD is a wide spread disorder which means no 2 people have exact same symptoms.

SOME INTERESTING FACTS:

• - it presents during the first three years of a person's life
• - ASD affects person's communication and social  interaction skills
• - people with autism have difficulties to understand the feelings of other people
• - psychologists estimated that boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls
• - people with Autism have often obsessions
• - it's important to realize that people with Autism have feelings too
• - children with Autism may learn much faster than other children
  
  

 

AUTISM and EMOTIONS:   

People with Autism can become very frustrated with many moments in their lives. They can't express, verbalize, or understand what they feel which makes them nervous and even more stressed. These people need more help to learn how to deal with the upsets of everyday life and more time to learn how to express their emotions and what they really feel.

People with Autism report greater levels of negative emotion in general.

People with Autism have lack of effective emotion regulation strategies. 

Strategies: Reappraisal-reevaluate what just happened

                    Suppression-hiding your true feelings

Memory & Alzheimer's Disease

Gender Differences: 

Psychologists estimated that women with Alzheimer's disease show worse mental deterioration than men with this disease. It mostly affects women's verbal skills. Psychologists explain it as it is due to a hormonal influence. The reason why women have worse mental deterioration than men is because of women's loss of estrogen. Men are more lucky in this case, because they have a greater cognitive reserve which provides protection against the disease process. 

Another difference between male and female gender is that women are better at remembering faces, especially female faces. The reason is that women focus more on female faces than on male faces. In my opinion it's because of the competition. Women also excell in verbal episody memory tasks that include remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men outperform women in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information, known as visuospatial processing.

Cultural Differences: 

"Childhood amnesia" is an inability to remember our earliest childhood memories. Believe or not, but our culture shapes how we remember our past and from what year we have our first childhood memory. The way parents discuss the events in children's lives influences the way the children will later remember those memories. People who grow up in a society which focuses on an individual personal history  (U.S) or on a family history (Maori) have earlier childhood memories than people who come from culture that values interdependence. (Asian cultures) 

Angela Gutchess, assistant professor of psychology has evidence that Western cultures  focus more on objects and categories, ­whereas people who come  Eastern cultures focus more on contextual details and similarities and they sort it by functional relationships. For example: Western cultures pair a squirrel with another similar animal (because they are both animals), but Eastern cultures pair a squirrel with a nut, because squirrels eat nuts.

Alzheimer's Disease: The Forgetting

1. Why do you think Alzheimer's disease is so much more common now than it was in the past?    Explain your answer. 

I have two explanations. One of them is that people in the past were dying much earlier, like in their sixties so that's why they didn't even get to the age where people normally get Alzheimer's disease. The second explanation is that in the past, people didn't even recognize Alzheimer's. They were loosing their mind as well as we do but they weren't aware of it.

  2. How is Alzheimer's an economic issue?

As the amount of people with Alzheimer's disease increases, so do problems in government. The reason why  this is an economic issue is that people with this disease need help, and special care and while the government tries to help them it also looses lots of money.

3. Explain how Alzheimer's disease was "discovered".

This disease was discovered by a famous scientist, called Alzheimer. He found out that one characteristic of Alzheimer's disease is that your neurons start to disappear and you have neuro-fibrillary tangles and senile plaques in you brain. 

4. Explain the concept that Alzheimer's robs you of your identity.

A person with this disease becomes a whole different person. He starts being nervous and mean and he doesn't recognize even his closest family.

5. Describe the process that Alzheimer's disease follows.

    There are four stages of Alzheimer's disease:   a) Early

                                                                                             b) Mid.

                                                                                             c) Moderate

                                                                                             d) Severe

  a) Very Early Signs and Symptoms

    

-memory problems, word-finding, impaired reasoning or judgment

    

  b) Mid. Alzheimer's Disease

-getting lost, trouble paying bills, everything gets worse, less alive neurons

  

  c) Moderate Alzheimer's Disease

-language, sensory processing, problems with recognizing

  d) Severe Alzheimer's Disease

         

 -tangles and plaques are spreading throughout the brain, cannot communicate, a  death is coming