Asperger syndrome, a type of autism spectrum disorder, can impact daily life in various ways, including:

Social interaction - People with Asperger syndrome may have some difficulties with social communication, interpreting nonverbal cues, and forming and maintaining relationships.
Repetitive behaviours - They may engage in repetitive behaviours or routines and have trouble adapting to change.
Sensory sensitivities - Some individuals with Asperger syndrome may be overly sensitive to certain stimuli, such as noise or touch.
Focus and attention - They may have intense interests in specific topics and have trouble shifting focus or paying attention to other tasks.
Executive function - People with Asperger syndrome may have challenges with executive function skills such as organization, time management, and problem-solving.

It's important to note that each person with Asperger syndrome is unique and may experience these symptoms to varying degrees.

People synchronize with each other through a process called interpersonal synchronization, which involves coordinating movements, behaviours, or emotional states with others. This can occur unconsciously and can be influenced by:

Rhythms - People tend to naturally synchronize with the rhythms around them, such as the beat of music.
Mirror neurons - These brain cells respond both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else perform the same action, promoting synchrony.
Empathy - When people feel empathy for each other, they are more likely to synchronize with each other.
Social cues - People tend to follow each other's gaze, posture, and gestures, leading to synchronization.
Group dynamics - People are more likely to synchronize with each other in a group setting, where social norms and shared goals can encourage coordination.

Interpersonal synchronization has been found to play a role in a variety of social situations, such as improving teamwork and communication, enhancing emotional connections, and fostering a sense of belonging in groups.

Barriers to Interpersonal synchronization:

Different Tempos: Individuals may have different natural rhythms, causing difficulty in synchronizing movements or speech.
Communication Barriers: Language, cultural, or social differences can create a lack of understanding, making it difficult to coordinate actions and behaviours.
Inadequate Attention: Interpersonal synchronization can be disrupted if one or both individuals are not paying attention, either due to distractions or lack of motivation.
Power Imbalance: When one person holds more power or control, they may dominate the synchronization, making it difficult for the other person to match their movements.
Different Goals and Motivations: When individuals have different goals or motivations, they may struggle to coordinate their actions effectively.
Physical or Cognitive Disabilities: Individuals with physical or cognitive disabilities may have difficulty coordinating movements or understanding instructions.
Psychological Factors: Psychological factors, such as anxiety, depression, or stress, can affect an individual's ability to synchronize with others.
Technological Limitations: The use of technology, such as videoconferencing, can create barriers to interpersonal synchronization, due to differences in technology, connectivity, or time lags.

Different Perceptions: Individuals may perceive things differently, leading to differences in how they interpret and respond to stimuli, which can impact interpersonal synchronization.
Personal Space: Interpersonal synchronization can be disrupted when individuals feel invaded or uncomfortable with the proximity of others, leading to difficulty coordinating movements or speech.
Cognitive Load: When individuals are facing high levels of cognitive load, it can be difficult for them to synchronize their actions with others, as they are focused on their own tasks.
Prejudice and Bias: Prejudice and bias can lead to distrust and discomfort, which can disrupt interpersonal synchronization.
Habits and Behaviours: Habits and behaviours that have been developed over time may make it difficult for individuals to synchronize with others, as they are comfortable with their own patterns of behaviour.
Different Learning Styles: Individuals may have different learning styles, which can impact their ability to coordinate movements or understand instructions.

These barriers to interpersonal synchronization can vary in their impact and significance, and may be influenced by individual and situational factors. Understanding and overcoming these barriers can help improve interpersonal synchronization and enhance communication and collaboration.

We can understand and master this!

The energy used to balance differences in these modes of synchronisation can leave a person very tired.

This is where a manual mental gearbox is better than an automatic one. We can select the gears that best fit the conditions if we know what they do and how they work. The gears being the different aspects of synchronisation, our awareness of these aspects allow us to adjust as necessary.

20 hours of practice is what it takes to become proficient at a skill.

Interpersonal synchronization is associated with a range of emotional and neurochemical responses. Some of these include:

Emotional contagion - Synchronizing with others can spread emotions from one person to another, creating a sense of shared experience.
Bonding - Interpersonal synchronization has been shown to enhance feelings of trust and social bonding between people.
Stress reduction - Synchronizing with others, such as through coordinated breathing or rhythmic movements, has been shown to decrease stress levels.
Increased oxytocin - Interpersonal synchronization has been associated with an increase in oxytocin, a hormone that is involved in social bonding and trust.
Activation of the reward system - Synchronizing with others can activate the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in the brain's reward system, contributing to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.

It is important to note that while interpersonal synchronization can have positive effects on emotional and neurochemical responses, it can also lead to negative effects in certain situations, such as when synchronizing with others who are experiencing negative emotions or when synchronizing with others who are participating in harmful behaviours.

If we socialise with idiots we will eventually pick up their bad habits.

It would be more beneficial to socialise and work with people of a similar intellect or cleverer. ( cleverer can be kinder or better in another way)

Life is short, play your best game!

Autistic people demonstrate speech rhythm differences that are consistent across languages, study finds

by Beth Ellwood

August 22, 2022

in Mental Health, Social Psychology

Findings from a machine learning study suggest that some of the speech differences associated with autism are consistent across languages, while others are language-specific. The study, published in the journal PLOS One, was conducted among separate samples of English speakers and Cantonese speakers.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often accompanied by differences in speech prosody. Speech prosody describes aspects of speech, like rhythm and intonation, that help us express emotions and convey meaning with our words. Atypical speech prosody can interfere with a person’s communication and social abilities, for example, by causing a person to misunderstand others or be misunderstood themselves. The reason these speech differences commonly present among autistic people is not fully understood.

Study author Joseph C. Y. Lau and his team wanted to shed light on this topic by studying prosodic features associated with autism across two typologically distinct languages.

“As a speech scientist who is bilingual and born in a foreign country, how different cultures and language experience shape human beings always fascinate me. When studying autism, there are so many novel insights that a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic approach could enlighten us with,” said Lau, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and member of Molly Losh’s Neurodevelopmental Disabilities Laboratory.

While most related studies have examined English-speaking groups, prosody is used differently across languages. Accordingly, there is reason to believe that the prosodic features associated with autism are also language-specific. With their study, Lau and his colleagues investigated which aspects of speech prosody are reliably associated with autism across languages and which are not.

The participants of the study were native English speakers from the United States and Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong. Among the English group, 55 of the participants were autistic, and 39 were neurotypical. Among the Cantonese group, 28 participants were autistic, and 24 were neurotypical. All participants were asked to narrate the story of a wordless picture book. Their speech was recorded, transcribed, and then divided into individual utterances for further examination.

The researchers used a computer program to extract the speech rhythm and intonation from the narrative samples. Rhythm refers to variations in timing and loudness of speech, while intonation refers to variations in voice pitch. The researchers then used machine learning, a technique that uses computer systems to analyze and interpret data, to try to classify autistic participants versus participants with typical development.

The findings revealed that speech rhythm could reliably classify autistic participants versus neurotypical participants among both the English and Cantonese samples. However, speech intonation could only classify autistic participants versus neurotypical participants in the English sample. Further, when the researchers analyzed a combined dataset of both English and Cantonese speakers, only speech rhythm reliably classified autistic individuals from neurotypical participants.

These results indicate that there were features of speech rhythm that offered enough information for the machine learning algorithm to distinguish between an autistic speaker and a neurotypical speaker. The authors said this falls in line with past research suggesting that autistic people demonstrate reliable differences in stress patterns, speech rate, and loudness of speech. Moreover, the findings suggest that these differences are consistent across two distinct languages.

“When we use a AI-based analytic method to study features of autism across languages in an objective and holistic way, we can see there are features that are strikingly common in autistic individuals from different parts of the world; meanwhile there are also some other features of autism that are manifested differently, as shaped by their language and culture,” Lau told PsyPost.

“In our case, we found that speech rhythm (i.e., the periodicity of speech patterns) showed such commonalities, whereas intonation (i.e., the variation of pitch when we speak) demonstrated differences cross-linguistically. Identifying common features may give us a pathway to examine the deep biological bases of autism that strongly influence language and behavior in a homogenous way in autism across cultures. On the other hand, cross-culturally or cross-linguistically different features may reflect features of autism that can be more easily changed by experience, which may potentially reflect potentially good targets for clinical intervention.”

Notably, intonation only predicted an autism diagnosis among the English sample, but not the Cantonese sample. The study authors say this could be because Cantonese is a tone language, which means that pitch can be used to change the meaning of words. “It is possible that the prolific usage of linguistic pitch in tone languages provides a compensatory effect ameliorating intonational differences in ASD,” the authors wrote. While further research in this area is needed, this may suggest that autistic people who speak non-tonal languages can benefit from speech interventions that focus on pitch and intonation.

“We believe that the cross-linguistic commonality of rhythmic patterns of autistic speech implicated in our study leads to an important follow-up area of enquiry: whether rhythm is a potentially universal feature of ASD that is less malleable by experience such as language,” Lau explained. “Testing this hypothesis will require a much larger sample size and many other languages, including languages from different language families around the world. We look forward to expanding our research programs and fostering international collaborations that will one day make such an investigation possible.”

“Although the immediate benefit of this study to the autistic community may seem little as it currently stands, we do hope that other than its theoretical implications, this machine learning study can inspire future scientific and technical developments that can make more direct benefits to the autistic community, such as in the realm of AI-assisted healthcare,” the researcher added.

The study, “Cross-linguistic patterns of speech prosodic differences in autism: A machine learning study”, was authored by Joseph C. Y. Lau, Shivani Patel, Xin Kang, Kritika Nayar, Gary E. Martin, Jason Choy, Patrick C. M. Wong, and Molly Losh.