Autism and Obsession: Ponderings of a Behaviorist

Please allow me a digression.......

Obsession is functional in as much as it's locus is some item or activity that benefits the individual devoting time to it. For instance, the autistic child's obsession with the repetitive spinning of a toy car's wheel would not qualify as a functional one by this defenition as the time spent spinning said wheel would be of no benefit to said child in terms of real life educational/exploratory play-experience even though it would appear that said child was enjoying it (based on affective display). In behaviorist terms, we would attempt to redirect this wheel-spinning behavior to some play activity or item that actually required spinning to play with appropriately and then praise the child for engaging in this, the ultimate goal of this redirection being the eventual extinction of the spinning behavior. Another way to handle this would be to redirect the wheel-spinning behavior to appropritate car-play behavior and then praise this, again, with extinction as the goal.

With consistency, such obsessions may be upset and a child can be taught to replace them with more functional ones and this is progress. Of course, this isn' t always the case. Take for instance an as-of-yet-unpublished writer obsessed with becoming quite the opposite. To remain consistent with our autism example, the obsessive behavior in this latter one would be writing and if the goal was to put this behavior in extinction then it would be necessary that it be replaced by some behavior "that benefits the individual devoting time to it ." In terms of real life, it may be appropriate to replace the nonfunctional writing behavior with a more lucrative one, and then reinforce/praise this replacement (in this case, lucre would be an adequate reinforcement). But of course this isn't as easy as it sounds. With autistic children spinning car wheels it is usually pretty simple to take the car from them, turn it right-side-up, and then model appropriate car play, even pairing this with "vrooom, vroooms" and "urrrrrrrchhhhhhes." But a fully grown man sitting at a computer desk working on a blog entry when in actuality he should be working on material development for an upcoming social thinking class poses a harder challenge, especailly if said man has a level of clout that affords him with a certain amount of immunity in terms of being questioned by supervisors/manegirial staff. In this case, redirection may not be effective. Instead, for this individual natural consequences are more effective and by natural consequences I mean submission rejection and perusers who tell you that your pieces just don't seem to 'work' but as is the autistic child, I am persistent in my obsession satisfaction and it will take many, many more rejections and nay-sayers to redirect me.