1. Chao, Elaine L. et. al. 2007. Adult learners in higher education: Barriers to success and strategies to improve results. Washington DC : US Department of Labor.
   
2. Cognitive and symptom profiles in Asperger's syndrome and high-functioning autism
3. Lazar, Michelle T. 2006. More than just a paycheck: Self-employment as a career option for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders. San Diego CA : San Diego State University.
   
4. [Novel advances in neuropsychology--forward to the "deconstruction" of psychiatry]
   

Seishin Shinkeigaku Zasshi 2006;108(10):1009-28.
[Novel advances in neuropsychology--forward to the "deconstruction" of psychiatry]
OHIGASHI Y.
The International Center/Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University

Neuropsychology has recently become a science which deals not only with instrumental disorders (e.g., aphasia, apraxia, and agnosia), but also with impairments of interpersonal relationships (e.g., emotional cognitions, social decision making, and understanding others), and many important paradigms are already provided. We could enumerate several representative instances:

(1) application of the "theory of mind" to autistic or related disorders (-->"reasoning of psychological state of others");

(2) neuropsychological studies on the "social brain" concerning emotional recognition or social recognition (-->"amygdale, orbitofrontal cortex, and medial ventral frontal cortex");

(3) identifying related cerebral areas (-->"superior temporal sulcus") to detect eye or body movements of others;

(4) discovering the mirror neuron and mirror systems in monkeys and humans (-->"imitation of the behavior of others in the brain"); and

(5) intracerebral processes which may occur precedent to conscious intention (-->"consciousness as post-hoc phenomena").

These novel paradigms might lead us to the "deconstruction" of psychiatry.

We believe that the fundamental assignments of neuropsychology should inquire into "cognitive representation", "conscious representation", and "cerebral representation" about the inner processes of human activities. As these assignments would be almost the same for the psychiatric symptoms, we do not have any necessity to fundamentally distinguish psychiatric and neuropsychologial symptoms. These two kinds of signs will be attributed finally to the same dimension.

The specificity of psychiatry resides in "conscious representation" and its cerebral foundations.

We reconsidered the "Theory of Neural Group Selection" proposed by Edelman and the excellent experimental results on the relationship between intention and movements reported by Libet, et al..  All these results strongly indicate the absolute necessity to reconsider conscious causality and psychogenesis.

Finally, we have presented two main neuropsychological hypotheses on the manifestation mechanism of Capgras syndrome.

These are (1)  the "mirror impairment of prosopagnosia" hypothesis and (2) the "self-other confusion resulting from right hemisphere dysfunction" hypothesis.  We insisted on the importance of the right cerebral predominance hypothesis about self-other understanding processes and also the absolute necessity to shake ourselves free from language-dependent consciousness theory.

Common specificity in neuropsychology and psychiatry should be converged to, and symbolized by the novel concept of sociality, which is characterized for instance by emotional cognition or social decision making supported by the social brain and by shared cerebral representations for self-other understanding and consciousness processes.

 The following second abstract is presented to demonstrate to clinical practitioners the self-serving pronunciamentos of some autism industry professionals and how some careers continue to be built on such twaddle. Note the institutional affiliations. One is an organization that firmly embraces the findings and recommendations of the World Health Organization. The other is reflective of arbitrary and meaningless labels isolated from the social and environmental contexts. [RNM]

Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 2007;61(1):99-104.
Cognitive and symptom profiles in Asperger's syndrome and high-functioning autism.
KOYAMA T, TACHIMORI H, OSADA H, TAKEDA T, KURITA H.
Department of Mental Health Administration, National Institute of Mental Health, National Center for Neurology and Psychiatry, Kodaira, Tokyo, Japan. tomok@ncnp.go.jp

Asperger syndrome (AS) and autistic disorder are two subtypes of pervasive developmental disorders (PDD), but there has been considerable debate over whether AS and autistic disorder without mental retardation (IQ > or = 70), called high-functioning autism (HFA), are distinct conditions or not. The aim of the present paper was to clarify this issue through a comparison of cognitive function and autistic symptom profiles. Based on the DSM-IV and ICD-10 definitions of language acquisition, 36 age- and IQ-balanced subjects with AS (mean age, 12.8 years; mean full-scale IQ, 98.3) were compared with 37 subjects with HFA (mean age, 12.6 years; mean full-scale IQ, 94.6) on the Japanese version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales and the Childhood Autism Rating Scale-Tokyo Version (CARS-TV). Compared with the HFA subjects, the AS subjects scored significantly higher on Verbal IQ, Vocabulary, and Comprehension, but scored significantly lower on Coding. Although the total CARS-TV score did not differ significantly between the two groups, AS subjects scored significantly lower (i.e. less abnormal) on Verbal communication and Non-verbal communication than did the HFA subjects. A history of normal language acquisition in early childhood could predict his/her better verbal ability in mid-childhood or later. Autistic cognitive characteristics shared by both AS and HFA subjects appear to support the validity of the current diagnostic classification of PDD.