Research reveals shared traits.
Other than the fact that autism and video game addiction are both hot issues, there appears to be more common ground than most would suspect. Don't panic, there's no cause-and-effect here, or even any correlation.
At the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference in Dublin, some researchers Dr. John Charlton and Ian Danforth claimed that video game addicts share certain personality traits with individuals suffering from Aspergers, an advanced form of autism.
391 subjects (86% male) were questioned for this study, and the final report concluded "that the closer the players got to addiction the more likely they were to display negative personality traits." The three personality traits in question (normally associated with Aspergers) are neuroticism, and lack of extraversion and agreeableness.
Charlton and Danforth acknowledge that these game addicts cannot be classified as having Aspergers, they "share some of the same characteristics because they find it easier to empathize with computer systems than other people." The two are essentially placing this group on a spectrum, sort of like a scale to measure normalcy.
"Our research supports the idea that people who are heavily involved in game playing may be nearer to autistic spectrum disorders than people who have no interest in gaming," Charlton explains.
To be sure, no one is claiming that game addicts are in danger of being autistic, but we are all aware of the delibilitating effects games can have on certain people. The research is, at least, a stab in some direction, a seemingly valid attempt at figuring all this out.
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This could be intriguing, though. Something most kids do being linked to something which most people fear and very few understand. Could cause division among people.
All they're saying, is they display similar traits. It even says at the top of this article that there isn't any correlation, no cause-and-effect (as you seem to be getting at)....
I'm not saying that I consider this to be based on cause-and-effect. But a lot of people panic as soon as the "debilitating" condition is mentioned and make their own links to satisfy their hunger for fear, whether they acknowledge it or not.
Isn't it like that with ANY addiction? Not just video games.
Right. Umm... Autism. New study. Videogame haters. Yada yada. Damn scientists.
In scientific terms, Waldman's research is highly convincing. Nevertheless is has been ignored or dismissed. Our culture is so enamored of television and the computer that it resists the accumulating evidence that early over-exposure leads to behavioral problems in children. Parents of autistic children dread feeling blamed and so resist the possibility that their use of television, DVDs, or computer games may inadvertently have triggered autism.
Both the public and many researchers have been misled by the evidence that autism is correlated with genetic factors (Time, 2006)[2]. In fact the genetic evidence shows that genetic factors may predispose an infant to autism, but that genetic factors alone do not cause autism. For example, when one genetically identical twin is autistic, the other is usually not autistic.
Research on autism is often flawed by mechanistic assumptions about the brain. It is now well-established - but not widely understood, even amongst biologists and medical professionals - that biological structures are not mechanisms but dynamic systems. Mechanisms miss-function when a component is faulty - hence people expect a faulty gene to cause autism. Dynamic systems organize themselves with extensive input from the environment. These issues are explained more fully in an on-line article in Dynamical Psychology (2004)[3].
Meanwhile, Waldman's results continue to be highly convincing. They deserve to be taken very seriously indeed.
(My own scientific experience was as a molecular biologist at Duke University, M.I.T., and the M.R.C. Laboratories in Cambridge, England.)
Sincerely,
Maxson J. McDowell PhD, LMSW, LP
(1) www.johnson.cornell.edu/faculty/profiles/wald...
(2) www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,15486...
(3) www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2004/Autism04.htm
there are far worse addictions than video game addictions (ciggaretes, drugs, cell phones etc...) so why don't you guys spend your time with them and leave the gaming comunity alone?
i have to agree that playing games all the time can do you bad things...but enough is enough already, we know it, as we know that drugs and ciggaretes can kill you but who's actually gonna try to overcome his/her addiction just because of some research?
The doctors did explain that spectrum on which they place people, used to measure social normalcy. They mentioned that sometimes, people in different careers or fields will measure along different ends, but there is no extreme (because that would be considered a "disorder" like autism). What they said is that these quirks they see in those severely addicted to video games would put the subjects much further down the scale, and much closer to autism than any naturally displayed personality traits.
I didn't see it as an antigame article.
Just information supported by scientific facts.
It's just a bit of an experience you must gain gradually, if more people are prepared to do this, we'll have less misunderstandings about it in the future. Hopefully, that is.
Yeah, but other readers might see it differently. :]
What's interesting here is that it's not some kind of environmental factor or something otherwise beyond a person's control, it's something a person actively chooses to do being linked, even if it's not being called a cause or trigger. So the public reaction to that, when they establish their own links and bring their own misconceived ideas to the table, might well be quite different to previously.
And in defence of the study, iamjoe56, the study was based around a perceived link of whatever sort between gaming addicts and autistic people. To perform the study without attempting to study that link would be impossible. You can't compare two cars and not take one of them into the study; similar logic applies.
When I found out what I was diagnosed with, I was 10 or 11, and to be honest I didn't even know what it was. But what I didn't understand at the time is why my mom was so upset over the news.
But as time grew on, I eventually gained an understanding of what it was. Yet myself nor my family in general or my parents in particular could figure out the trigger, which I think varies from person-to-person. Video games may not have caused my Asperger's, but they heightened my reflexes and helped me to pay attention to details. I can be pretty sure that I was born with Asperger's; this was destined to happen.
I made a conscious choice to not tell people [that I have Asperger's Syndrome] because I was not sure of how they would react. Some, like my girlfriend and by best friend from high school, have been very understanding and accepting; others have turned the other way and actually teased me because of my so-called handicap. To make matters worse, I have had supervisors at previous jobs (not my current one, mind you) make my life tougher because of my disability; specifically I think I was released from my first job and not brought back to a summer job because both supervisors were not accepting of the fact that I had A.S. The first supervisor no longer works at the first job, and the owner has ironically come under scrutiny from that company's HQ, whereas the second supervisor got promoted to an H.R. job in the same store despite having a reputed history of poorly treating employees that have various disabilities.
Some have gone as far as to call each of those two cases (and some incidents during my years of grade schooling K-12) discrimination, which is an unfortunate downside of having any learning disability.
But what must be remembered is in this brief poem:
When it comes to people
It is NOT in the disability But the ability
In which one is to be judged.
-LP_04