Reasons Behind “Impaired Social Interaction” in ASD Kids
"Why does our child (with high functioning autism) have such difficulty understanding the feelings of others? He can be terribly cruel at times, which really hurts his younger brothers' feelings. Yet he seems to have all the compassion in the world for our 2 dogs." You're referring to a social-skills deficit here. There are various theories as to why children with Asperger’s (AS) and High-Functioning Autism (HFA) have impaired social skills. Some researchers suggest that poor social skills may be caused by: weakness or absence of the social gaze response sensory distractions, which prevent the child from concentrating on social issues memory dysfunction (e.g., deficits in memory for faces and common social scenes), which prevent the child from remembering other people or events failure to develop a “theory of mind,” which prevents the child from understanding what other people are thinking or feeling failure of affective processing The relationship betw