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Handyman Credit: Chris Isherwood
(November 3, 2015) Measuring
autistic traits in just under half a million people reveals that your sex, and
whether you work in a STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics)
job, predict how many autistic traits you have, according to new research
published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Autistic traits are
not the same as having a diagnosis of autism; instead, these are
characteristics of personality and behaviour that are found throughout the
general population and are linked to what is seen in the clinical condition of
autism. Everyone has some autistic
traits – such as difficulty in taking another person’s point of view,
difficulty in switching attention flexibly, and excellent attention to detail –
and there is a wide range in the population. 15 years ago a team of scientists
at the University of Cambridge developed a way of measuring these, using a
questionnaire called the Autism Spectrum Quotient, or AQ. This comprises 50
questions, each one representing one autistic trait.
The AQ has been used in hundreds of studies, conducted in
samples of a few hundred people. Previous work has found that, on average, men
score higher than women, and those studying a STEM degree score higher than
those who do not. On average, the male AQ score was 21.6, compared to a female
score of 19.0. People work in a STEM-related job had an average AQ score of
21.9 compared to a score of 18.9 for individuals working in non-STEM jobs. This
suggests autistic traits are linked to both sex and to having a
‘systems-thinking’ mind. The new research tested this in the largest study to
date, in 450,395 individuals. The previous sex difference and the link to STEM
were both strongly confirmed.
The study was led by Emily Ruzich, a PhD student, and Professor
Simon Baron-Cohen at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.
The huge sample size was made possible through a collaboration with the public
service television broadcaster Channel 4 in the UK, which put the AQ on its
website following a discussion of autism and autistic traits on its flagship
health TV programme Embarrassing Bodies: Live from the Clinic. Viewers from all
over the UK took the online test.
The half-a-million participants were on average aged in
their thirties, included those as young as late teens up to their seventies,
and were living all over the UK. This allowed the research team to also test
two factors that they predicted would not be linked to AQ: age and geographical
region. As predicted, neither age nor geography predicted a person’s number of
autistic traits. - See more at:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-of-half-a-million-people-reveals-sex-and-job-predict-how-many-autistic-traits-you-have#sthash.Wcetyyqt.dpuf