Under Pressure: Why We “Choke” At The Critical Moment

A star golfer misses a critical putt; a brilliant student fails to ace a test; a savvy salesperson blows a key presentation. Each of these people has suffered the same bump in mental processing: They have just choked under pressure.

Credit: and Source: ScienceDaily

It’s tempting to dismiss such failures as “just nerves.” But to University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock, they are preventable results of information logjams in the brain. By studying how the brain works when we are doing our best — and when we choke — Beilock has formulated practical ideas about how to overcome performance lapses at critical moments.

“Choking is suboptimal performance, not just poor performance. It’s a performance that is inferior to what you can do and have done in the past and occurs when you feel pressure to get everything right,” said Beilock, an associate professor in psychology.

Preventing choking in sports Some of the most spectacular and memorable moments of choking occur in sports when the whole world is watching. Many remember golfer Greg Norman’s choke at the 1996 U.S. Masters. Norman had played brilliantly for the first three days of the tournament, taking a huge lead. But on the final day, his performance took a dive, and he ended the Masters five shots out of first place.

Choking in such cases happens when the polished programs executed by the brains of extremely accomplished athletes go awry. In “Choke,” Beilock recounts famous examples of these malfunctions in the context of brain science to tell the story of why people choke and what can be done to alleviate it.

Thinking too much about what you are doing, because you are worried about losing the lead (as in Norman’s case) or worrying about failing in general, can lead to “paralysis by analysis.” In a nutshell, paralysis by analysis occurs when people try to control every aspect of what they are doing in an attempt to ensure success.

Unfortunately, this increased control can backfire, disrupting what was once a fluid, flawless performance.

“My research team and I have found that highly skilled golfers are more likely to hole a simple 3-foot putt when we give them the tools to stop analyzing their shot, to stop thinking,” Beilock said. “Highly practiced putts run better when you don’t try to control every aspect of performance.” Even a simple trick of singing helps prevent portions of the brain that might interfere with performance from taking over, Beilock’s research shows.

Preventing choking on tests and in business The brain also can work to sabotage performance in ways other than paralysis by analysis. For instance, pressure-filled situations can deplete a part of the brain’s processing power known as working memory, which is critical to many everyday activities.

Beilock’s work has shown the importance of working memory in helping people perform their best, in academics and in business. Working memory is lodged in the prefrontal cortex and is a sort of mental scratch pad that is temporary storage for information relevant to the task at hand, whether that task is doing a math problem at the board or responding to tough, on-the-spot questions from a client. Talented people often have the most working memory, but when worries creep up, the working memory they normally use to succeed becomes overburdened. People lose the brain power necessary to excel.

One example is the phenomenon of “stereotype threat.” This is when otherwise talented people don’t perform up to their abilities because they are worried about confirming popular cultural myths that contend, for instance, that boys and girls naturally perform differently in math or that a person’s race determines his or her test performance.

Beilock’s research is the basis of her new book, “Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting it Right When You Have To,” published Sept. 21 by Simon and Schuster, Free Press.

In Choke, Beilock describes research demonstrating that high-achieving people underperform when they are worried about confirming a stereotype about the racial group or gender to which they belong. These worries deplete the working memory necessary for success. The perceptions take hold early in schooling and can be either reinforced or abolished by powerful role models.

In one study, researchers gave standardized tests to black and white students, both before and after President Obama was elected. Black test takers performed worse than white test takers before the election. Immediately after Obama’s election, however, blacks’ performance improved so much that their scores were nearly equal with whites. When black students can overcome the worries brought on by stereotypes, because they see someone like President Obama who directly counters myths about racial variation in intelligence, their performance improves.

Beilock and her colleagues also have shown that when first-grade girls believe that boys are better than girls at math, they perform more poorly on math tests. One big source of this belief? The girls’ female teachers. It turns out that elementary school teachers are often highly anxious about their own math abilities, and this anxiety is modeled from teacher to student. When the teachers serve as positive role models in math, their male and female students perform equally well.

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Meditation and practice can help Even when a student is not a member of a stereotyped group, tests can be challenging for the brightest people, who can clutch if anxiety taps out their mental resources. In that instance, relaxation techniques can help.

In tests in her lab, Beilock and her research team gave people with no meditation experience 10 minutes of meditation training before they took a high-stakes test. Students with meditation preparation scored 87, or B+, versus the 82 or B- score of those without meditation training. This difference in performance occurred despite the fact that all students were of equal ability.

Stress can undermine performance in the world of business, where competition for sales, giving high-stakes presentations or even meeting your boss in the elevator are occasions when choking can squander opportunities.

Practice helps people navigate through these tosses on life’s ocean. But, more importantly, practicing under stress — even a moderate amount — helps a person feel comfortable when they find themselves standing in the line of fire, Beilock said. The experience of having dealt with stress makes those situations seem like old hat. The goal is to close the gap between practice and performance.

A person also can overcome anxiety by thinking about what to say, not what not to say, said Beilock, who added that staying positive is always a good idea.

“Think about the journey, not the outcome,” Beilock advised. “Remind yourself that you have the background to succeed and that you are in control of the situation. This can be the confidence boost you need to ace your pitch or to succeed in other ways when facing life’s challenges.”

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And They All Lived Together In a Little Row Boat…Clap! Clap!: How Clapping Games Improve Cognition And Motor Skills In Children

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, April 28, 2010 – A researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) conducted the first study of hand-clapping songs, revealing a direct link between those activities and the development of important skills in children and young adults, including university students.

“We found that children in the first, second and third grades who sing these songs demonstrate skills absent in children who don’t take part in similar activities,” explains Dr. Idit Sulkin a member of BGU’s Music Science Lab in the Department of the Arts.

“We also found that children who spontaneously perform hand-clapping songs in the yard during recess have neater handwriting, write better and make fewer spelling errors.”

Dr. Warren Brodsky, the music psychologist who supervised her doctoral dissertation, said Sulkin’s findings lead to the presumption that “children who don’t participate in such games may be more at risk for developmental learning problems like dyslexia and dyscalculia.

“There’s no doubt such activities train the brain and influence development in other areas.  The children’s teachers also believe that social integration is better for these children than those who don’t take part in these songs.”

As part of the study, Sulkin went to several elementary school classrooms and engaged the children in either a board of education sanctioned music appreciation program or hand-clapping songs training – each lasting a period of 10 weeks.

“Within a very short period of time, the children who until then hadn’t taken part in such activities caught up in their cognitive abilities to those who did,” she said.  But this finding only surfaced for the group of children undergoing hand-clapping songs training. The result led Sulkin to conclude that hand-clapping songs should be made an integral part of education for children aged six to 10, for the purpose of motor and cognitive training.

During the study, “Impact of Hand-clapping Songs on Cognitive and Motor Tasks,” Dr. Sulkin interviewed school and kindergarten teachers, visited their classrooms and joined the children in singing. Her original goal, as part of her thesis, was to figure out why children are fascinated by singing and clapping up until the end of third grade, when these pastimes are abruptly abandoned and replaced with sports.

“This fact explains a developmental process the children are going through,” Dr. Sulkin observes.  “The hand-clapping songs appear naturally in children’s lives around the age of seven, and disappear around the age of 10.  In this narrow window, these activities serve as a developmental platform to enhance children’s needs — emotional, sociological, physiological and cognitive. It’s a transition stage that leads them to the next phases of growing up.”

Sulkin says that no in-depth, long-term study has been conducted on the effects that hand-clapping songs have on children’s motor and cognitive skills.  However, the relationship between music and intellectual development in children has been studied extensively, prompting countless parents to obtain a “Baby Mozart” CD for their children.

Click image to read reviews

Nevertheless, the BGU study demonstrates that listening to 10 minutes of Mozart music (.i.e., the ‘Mozart Effect’) does not improve spatial task performance compared to 10 minutes of hand-clapping songs training or 10 minutes of exposure to silence.

Lastly, Sulkin discovered that hand-clapping song activity has a positive effect on adults: University students who filled out her questionnaires reported that after taking up such games, they became more focused and less tense.

“These techniques are associated with childhood, and many adults treat them as a joke,” she said.  “But once they start clapping, they report feeling more alert and in a better mood.”

Sulkin grew up in a musical home.  Her father, Dr. Adi Sulkin, is a well-known music educator who, in the 1970s and 1980s, recorded and published over 50 cassettes and videos depicting Israeli children’s play-songs, street-songs, holiday and seasonal songs, and singing games targeting academic skills.

“So quite apart from the research experience, working on this was like a second childhood,” she noted.

Source: American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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Kids Who Bully Want Status But Long For Affection

Read The Original Research Paper HERE (Free PDF-internal link)

From ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2010) — Bullying is common in classrooms around the world: About 15 percent of children are victimized, leading to depression, anxiety, loneliness, and other negative outcomes. What’s driving bullies to behave the way they do? According to a new large-scale Dutch study, most bullies are motivated by the pursuit of status and affection.

Briliant Book! Click to read reviews at Amazon

The longitudinal study was conducted by researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. It appears in the March/April 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.

In their work, the researchers questioned almost 500 elementary-school children ages 9 to 12. Based on their findings, they conclude that bullies generally choose to gain status by dominating their victims. But at the same time, they try to reduce the chances that they’ll end up on the outs with other classmates by choosing as victims children who are weak and not well-liked by others. In short, even bullies care a lot about others’ affection and don’t want to lose it.

Gender also plays a role. For example, the study finds that at this age, bullies only care about not losing affection from classmates of their own gender. So when boys bully boys, it doesn’t matter whether girls approve or disapprove. The same holds for girls. Moreover, boys will bully only those girls that aren’t well liked by other boys, regardless of what girls think about it, and girls will do the same in their bullying of boys.

“To understand the complex nature of acceptance and rejection, it’s necessary to distinguish the gender of the bully, the gender of the target, and the gender of the classmates who accept and reject bullies and victims,” according to René Veenstra, professor of sociology at the University of Groningen, who led the study.

Read The Original Research Paper HERE (Free PDF-internal link)

Self Help For Anxiety & Depression: A List Of FREE Interactive Self Help Websites

Today I wanted to get around to doing what I have been meaning to do for a while and post a list of free access interactive and/or educational websites which I have come across. These sites are fantastic resources and each one offers a different way to get involved with your recovery. Please note I am not affiliated with any of these sites and they are not affiliate sites. I hope you find one or more useful as I know many of my clients have.

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Self Help / Educational Websites

Updated 27th March 2010

• Anxiety Online
• Beyond Blue
• —Moodgym
• Depnet
• Bipolar Disorder Education Program
• Blackdoginstitute
• BlueBoard
• BluePages
• CRUfAD – Self Help
• Depression Education Program
• e-couch
• Feardrop – online exposure therapy for phobias
• Living Well Working Well
• MoodSwings
• Multicultural Information on Depression online (MIDonline)
• Virtual Clinic
• Added 27th March 2010
• Depressioncenter.net
• Beatingtheblues (UK)

There you have it! Check them out and let me know what you think. Know of any others? (No affiliate sites please).

Academic Dishonesty = Fail: Procrastination & Copying Homework Increases Failure Rate Irrespective of Aptitude

Read The Original Research Paper HERE (PDF)

From ScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2010) — The history of students who copy homework from classmates may be as old as school itself. But in today’s age of lecture-hall laptops and online coursework, how prevalent and damaging to the education of students has such academic dishonesty become?

According to research published online March 18 in Physical Review Special Topics: Physics Education Research, it turns out that unnoticed student cheating is a significant cause of course failure nationally.

A researcher from the University of Kansas has teamed up with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to get a better handle on copying in college in the 21st century.

Young-Jin Lee, assistant professor of educational technology at KU, and the Research in Learning, Assessing and Tutoring Effectively group at MIT spent four years seeing how many copied answers MIT students submitted to MasteringPhysics, an online homework tutoring system.

“MIT freshmen are required to take physics,” said Lee. “Homework was given through a Web-based tutor that our group had developed. We analyzed when they logged in, when they logged out, what kind of problems they solved and what kinds of hints they used.”

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Lee said that it was easy to spot students who had obtained answers from classmates before completing the homework.

“We ran into very interesting students who could solve the problems — very hard problems — in less than one minute, without making any mistakes,” said Lee.

Students also were asked to complete an anonymous survey about the frequency of their homework copying. (According to the survey, students nationally admit to engaging in more academic dishonesty than MIT students.)

Among the researchers’ most notable findings:

* Students who procrastinated also copied more often. Those who started their homework three days ahead of deadline copied less than 10 percent of their problems, while those who drug their feet until the last minute were repetitive copiers.

The students who copied frequently had about three times the chance of failing the course.

* Results of the survey show that students are twice as likely to copy on written homework than on online homework.

* This study showed that doing all the homework assigned is “a surer route to exam success” than a preexisting aptitude for physics.

“People believe that students copy because of their poor academic skills,” Lee said. “But we found that repetitive copiers — students who copy over 30 percent of their homework problems — had enough knowledge, at least at the beginning of the semester. But they didn’t put enough effort in. They didn’t start their homework long enough ahead of time, as compared to noncopiers.”

Because repetitive copiers don’t adequately learn physics topics on which they copy the homework, Lee said, the research strongly implies that copying caused declining performance on analytic test problems later in the semester.

“Even though everyone knows not doing homework is bad for learning, no one knows how bad it is,” said Lee. “Now we have a quantitative measurement. It could make an A student get B or even C.”

At the beginning of a semester, the researchers found that copying was not as widespread as it was late in the semester.

“Obviously, the amount of copying was not so prevalent because the academic load was not as much at the beginning of the semester,” said Lee. “In order to copy solutions, the students need to build their networks. They need to get to know each other so that they can ask for the answers.”

But the KU researcher and his MIT colleagues also demonstrated that changes to college course formats — such as breaking up large lecture classes into smaller “studio” classes, increasing interactions between teaching staff and students, changing the grading system — could reduce student copying fourfold.

Read The Original Research Paper HERE (PDF)

Adapted from materials provided by University of Kansas

The Book Depository: Very Cheap Prices, FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE

I have just come across this site. The book prices are as good or better than Amazon and they ship free to any address worldwide no matter the size of the order. The Book Depository

www.thebookdepository.co.uk

I will be using this site for my blog links for highly recommended books from now on as I believe it provides the best value for most of my readers. I will continue to provide Amazon links in my Highly Recommended Books Library accessible from the menu on the right.

The Smile: A Super-Powered Facial Expression

John M Grohol PsyD   www.psychcentral.com

What’s In a Smile? For decades, psychology and its researchers have focused on the negative side of humanity — the things that bring dysfunction into our lives. Depression, sadness, anxiety, you name it. More recently, psychologists have also begun to better understand the value of positive emotions too. This understanding has resulted in a new field of research called “positive psychology” or “happiness research.”

So how do we recognize a positive emotion? Or put more simply, “What’s in a smile?”

A new paper just published by Disa Sauter (2010) helps us answer this question.

Happiness is In Your Smile

Psychological research into happiness has, for the most part, focused on facial expressions. It’s no wonder: most of our communication — both verbal and nonverbal — comes from our face. People across cultures understand the value of a smile and other facial expressions that point toward the emotion we call “being happy” or happiness. And we know that smiling itself can help increase positive, pro-social behaviors.

But how much research has examined more specific positive emotions in facial expressions? Surprisingly, only one study has been conducted that examined how the face displays specific positive emotions. The researchers in that study found:

[...] that displays of amusement and pride were signaled by smiles, but that amused smiles tended to be open-mouthed, whereas smiles of pride had compressed lips. In contrast, awe was typically expressed with raised eyebrows and a slightly open mouth, but not with smiles.

This study highlights that there is likely more than one kind of smile and that different smile configurations may communicate different affective states.

Smiles are more complicated that the simple communication of happiness. They can communicate a wide range of positive emotions, depending upon their specific makeup.

Pride

What about expressions of pride? Pride is considered a “secondary emotion” behind more basic emotions such as happiness and fear. Surprisingly, expressions of pride across cultures shares some specific characteristics:

Using photographs of participants from over 30 nations, Tracy and Matsumoto showed that individuals who won a fight produced a number of behaviors typically associated with pride expressions, including raising their arms, tilting their head back, smiling, and expanding their chest. This configuration of cues is recognized by observers as communicating pride.
Happy Noises & Touching

Just as with pride, there are apparently a number of universally recognized human sounds that express positive emotion. Research has shown that specific emotions recognized from sounds alone include amusement, triumph, sensual pleasure (the one we’re all most familiar with!) and relief.

You’d think that touch would be a sense that has been well-studied, given how important touch is to our emotional needs. But there has been very little research conducted examining the effects of human touch. What little research that has been done has found that certain positive emotions can sometimes be detected through touch:

They found that participants from two cultures (USA and Spain) could decode affective states from tactile stimulation on the arm. Emotions that were well recognized included several positive states, such as love, gratitude, and sympathy. Hertenstein et al. also showed that love was typically signaled with stroking, gratitude was communicated with a handshake, and sympathy was expressed with a patting movement.

Of course, some positive emotions are not well communicated through touch, including the general sense of “happiness.” Notice that only specific positive emotions — and only certain ones — are well-communicated through touch. Pride is an example of a positive emotion that has no equivalent touch sense.
Conclusions

What’s in a smile? A lot of information, telling the receiver of the smile whether you meant you were happy, amused, or proud. Research into human expression of positive emotions is ongoing and will explore more of these areas in years to come.

What we have found so far is that not every specific positive emotion — for instance, pride — is expressed through every type of sense.

As the researcher notes, “It will be interesting to consider whether ease of communication via different types of signals may relate to different “families” of emotions, such as self-conscious emotions including pride, and prosocial emotions like love.” If happiness can only be communicated through facial expressions, and not through touch, that’s good information to know when we think we’re communicating our happiness to a loved one through a specific gesture.

Happiness is a core component of life and living, and is associated with helping protect us against heart disease and enhancing our overall health. We also know that gratitude tends to lead to more happiness. The better we understand how happiness is expressed to others, perhaps the more clearly we’ll be able to communicate such emotions in the future.

Reference:

Sauter, D. (2010). More Than Happy: The Need for Disentangling Positive Emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19.

Original paper can be found HERE

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the intersection of technology and psychology since 1992.

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Viva La Siesta!: A Nap Significantly Boosts the Brain’s Learning Capacity

BERKELEY — If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter.

Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. The results support previous data from the same research team that pulling an all-nighter — a common practice at college during midterms and finals — decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40 percent, due to a shutdown of brain regions during sleep deprivation.

“Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the lead investigator of these studies.

In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels.

At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn.

Matthew Walker, assistant psychology professor, has found that a nap clears the brain to absorb new information.

These findings reinforce the researchers’ hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s shor

Students who napped (green column) did markedly better in memorizing tests than their no-nap counterparts. (Courtesy of Matthew Walker)

t-term memory storage and make room for new information, said Walker, who presented his preliminary findings on Sunday, Feb. 21, at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, Calif.

Since 2007, Walker and other sleep researchers have established that fact-based memories are temporarily stored in the hippocampus before being sent to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which may have more storage space.

“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” Walker said.

In the latest study, Walker and his team have broken new ground in discovering that this memory-refreshing process occurs when nappers are engaged in a specific stage of sleep. Electroencephalogram tests, which measure electrical activity in the brain, indicated that this refreshing of memory capacity is related to Stage 2 non-REM sleep, which takes place between deep sleep (non-REM) and the dream state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM). Previously, the purpose of this stage was unclear, but the new results offer evidence as to why humans spend at least half their sleeping hours in Stage 2, non-REM, Walker said.

“I can’t imagine Mother Nature would have us spend 50 percent of the night going from one sleep stage to another for no reason,” Walker said. “Sleep is sophisticated. It acts locally to give us what we need.”

Walker and his team will go on to investigate whether the reduction of sleep experienced by people as they get older is related to the documented decrease in our ability to learn as we age. Finding that link may be helpful in understanding such neurodegenerative conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, Walker said.

In addition to Walker, co-investigators of these new findings are  Bryce A. Mander and psychology undergraduate Sangeetha Santhanam.

Source: University of California, Berkeley         www.berkeley.edu

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Aspects of Self Harm: Self Harm vs. Self Injury & Why Does it Happen?

Every Month Australian Educational Website psychevisual.com offers a free video lecture with accompanying notes and research papers from one of its presenters as a promotional exercise. The presenters are usually highly regarded researchers in the field. THIS IS NOT AN AFFILIATE SITE, and there is no requirement to register.

This month the free lecture is on “Aspects of Self Harm” and is presented by Dr Janine Stevenson. It is approximately 30 minutes long and is

Streamed from This Page

UPDATE: The video is can now be viewed  below:

There are also complimentary PowerPoint Slides of the lecture content and free access to some of Dr Stevenson’s research papers are also available on this page in PDF format.

I hope you find this resource of some educational value.

You can find a collection of my recommended readings and books about self harm and self injury HERE.

Using Music to Help Children with Autism Understand Emotions (Plus Some Favorite ASD Resources)

This post got so many Retweets on my Twitter Timeline that I decided to repost it here. The original source is examiner.com, and the author is Sharon Gillson

Music affects all of us, and we can attest to it’s appeal to our emotions. Now researchers have developed a program designed to help children with ASD better understand emotions, and learn to recognize emotions in other people.

The children use a method of music education known as the Orff-Schulwerk (schulwerk is German for schooling) approach, which was developed by 20th-century German composer Carl Orff. This approach to music learning uses movement and is based on things that kids intuitively like to do, such as sing, chant rhymes, clap, dance and keep a beat or play a rhythm on anything near at hand.

The 12-week program uses elements from the Orff method — including games, instruments and teamwork — and combines them with musical games. The idea is to pair emotional musical excerpts with matching displays of social emotion (happy with happy, sad with sad, etc.) in a social, interactive setting.

Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, a researcher at the UCLA Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity and member of the of the Help Group–UCLA Autism Research Alliance, stated, “The purpose of this work is to provide a means for awakening the potential in every child for being ‘musical’ — that is, to be able to understand and use music and movement as forms of expression and, through that, to develop a recognition and understanding of emotions.”

Molnar-Szakacs also said that participating in musical activities has the potential to scaffold and enhance all other learning and development, from timing and language to social skills. “Beyond these more concrete intellectual benefits, the extraordinary power of music to trigger memories and emotions and join us together as an emotional, empathic and compassionate humanity are invaluable”

The goal of the research is to evaluate the effect of the music education program on outcomes in social communication and emotional functioning, as well as the children’s musical development.

————————————————————

I am constantly delighted and enthralled by the children, young people and adults with ASD with whom I have the opportunity to work. There is a frankness and depth in these conversations that blows my socks off just about every time we get together.

Here are some of the ASD resources that I use and recommend to my clients and patients as well as my colleagues.

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but rather some of those I have found most useful or been described as most helpful. Please have a look and see if you think they may be of use to you or someone you know. There are others listed in my “Highly Recommended  Books and Resources” Link to the right of this page.

Tony Atwood‘s Brilliant  The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome

The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspectives of Autism

Freaks, Geeks & Asperger Syndrome: A User Guide to Adolescence

and there are so many others! I’m just realising that this is an entire post topic in itself. Stay tuned. Any others you like” Any questions? Leave a comment!