Asperger Syndrome, commonly abbreviated AS, is a somewhat controversial and not entirely well understood pervasive developmental disorder. This is perhaps largely because of its relatively recent discovery. Hans Asperger, for whom it is named, published his research in 1944, where he called it autistic psychopathy, though this name fell out of favor due to association of the term psychopathy with the unrelated antisocial personality disorder. (Wing, 1981) It is considered to be related to, or a high-functioning form of, autism.(Bellini & Hopf, 2007) The current name was coined in 1981 (Wing, 1981) and it only gained official recognition as of the DSM-IV in 1994, meaning most diagnosed individuals are older than the diagnosis. It is also quite rare, affecting only about .03% of the population (Fombonne, 2005), though this number is somewhat disputable due to a lack of comprehensive study and the vagueness of some of the diagnostic criteria (Brasic, 2006). In contrast,......
Join Now or Login to view the rest of this paper.
Approximate Word Count: 3589
Approximate Pages: 14 (260 words per double-spaced page) |