Testosterone in patients with borderline personality disorder: from hair analyses to social behavior.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition resulting in unique modes of sensory processing, social communication difficulties, and restricted interests and/or repetitive behaviors (). The presence of cognitive and socioemotional difficulties varies widely among the estimated 1%–2% of the general population on the autism spectrum (; ). For example, about one-third of autistic children are classified as having an intellectual disability (). Additionally, up to 80% of autistic people develop mental health conditions as they get older (; ). Anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are particularly common (; ). Autism results from a combination of genetic and environmental factors. While etiology is unknown in most cases, autism is associated with known genetic mutations and syndromes (e.g., Rett syndrome, Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome; ). Autism is also heritable, and the recurrence rate within families is about 10%–20% (). Furthermore, parents of autistic children sometimes demonstrate autistic traits, known as the broader autism phenotype (BAP); approximately 18% of parents of autistic children report some autism-related characteristics of their own (). Given historical changes to the diagnostic criteria and awareness of autism, it is also possible that some of the parents identified as exhibiting the BAP are themselves autistic but undiagnosed. This means that some, but not all, autistic individuals develop in a family context that is familiar with autism, whether from a first-person (e.g., parents are autistic) or third-person (e.g., parents have experience raising an autistic child) perspective. From a developmental systems perspective, the effect of any particular influence on development will depend on the context in which it occurs (e.g., ; ; ). It is important, therefore, to explore the full range of developmental variation across contexts. Consider the d/Deaf community, which is similar to the autistic community in some respects; for example, deafness is often conceptualized as a disability in a society built around the needs and abilities of hearing people (a full account of the parallels and difference between the d/Deaf and a/Autistic communities, including the history of advocacy and use of capitalization to indicate identity, is beyond the scope of this paper). Since more than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents (), most research on deaf children is, by default, research on deaf children of hearing adults (DoH). When compared social cognition in deaf-of-deaf (DoD) and DoH children, they found that DoD children did not display the same delays as their DoH peers. The social cognition difficulties seen in DoH children cannot, therefore, be attributed to deafness per se; they depend in part on the family context. A similar mismatch between children’s needs and parents’ preparedness to meet those needs might occur when autistic children are raised by non-autistic parents (). For example, although high parental warmth is associated with positive developmental outcomes for nonautistic children (e.g., ), parental warmth in the form of physical affection might be perceived as intrusive by an autistic child. This is not to say that autistic children necessarily dislike physical affection, simply that non-autistic parents may fail to consider the possibility that sensory sensitivities might affect how autistic children perceive physical affection.