In autism, the social benefits of being a girl

[KamaAina]

http://news.yale.edu/2016/02/08/autism-social-benefits-being-girl

Infant girls at risk for autism pay more attention to social cues in faces than infant boys, according to a Yale School of Medicine study — the first one known to prospectively examine sex-related social differences in at-risk infants.

This difference in observational skills could help protect female siblings of children with autism from developing the disorder themselves, according to lead author Katarzyna Chawarska, associate professor in the Yale Child Study Center and in the Department of Pediatrics. The findings are published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry....

The infants were all shown a video of a woman smiling and cooing at them, while she was doing other activities like pointing to toys in different parts of the screen, and preparing a sandwich. The team tracked where the infants focused their gazes, and for how long.

“We found that the girls in the high-risk group displayed more attention to people and their faces than all other infants,” said Chawarska, who is also director of the Early Social Cognition Laboratory at Yale. “This increased access to social experiences during a highly formative developmental period predicted fewer social impairments at 2 years of age. It is important to note however, that this may not prevent ASD in high-risk females, but could mitigate the severity of autism symptoms.”

This might explain why there are proportionally so many Autistic women in our nascent self-advocacy movement. Suits me fine! I have no desire to be part of anything that is 80-20 male.