Computer game addicts like people with Aspergers
People who are addicted to playing computer games show some of the same personality traits as people with Aspergers syndrome.
This is the conclusion of Dr John Charlton of the University of Bolton and Ian Danforth of Whitman College, USA. Their results were presented at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference in Dublin on the Thursday 3 April 2008.
The researchers questioned 391 computer game players, 86 per cent of whom were male. They considered relationships between addiction, ‘high engagement’ and personality. They found that the closer the players got to addiction the more likely they were to display negative personality traits. And that as players showed more signs of addiction they were increasingly characterised by three personality traits that would normally be associated with Aspergers, a variety of high functioning autism. These were neuroticism, and lack of extraversion and agreeableness.
I wanted to post a little about Aspergers distorter. Check after the jump
Asperger’s Disorder is a milder variant of Autistic Disorder. Both Asperger’s Disorder and Autistic Disorder are in fact subgroups of a larger diagnostic category. This larger category is called either Autistic Spectrum Disorders, mostly in European countries, or Pervasive Developmental Disorders (“PDD”), in the United States. In Asperger’s Disorder, affected individuals are characterized by social isolation and eccentric behavior in childhood. There are impairments in two-sided social interaction and non-verbal communication. Though grammatical, their speech may sound peculiar due to abnormalities of inflection and a repetitive pattern. Clumsiness may be prominent both in their articulation and gross motor behavior. They usually have a circumscribed area of interest which usually leaves no space for more age appropriate, common interests. Some examples are cars, trains, French Literature, door knobs, hinges, cappucino, meteorology, astronomy or history. The name “Asperger” comes from Hans Asperger, an Austrian physician who first described the syndrome in 1944.
