Experiment to determine if stuffed animals benefit Aspies?

Post Reply New Topic

Hi!

A friend and I (I'm Aspie, she's NT) are trying to think up an experiment to determine whether or not giving an Aspie a stuffed animal will help calm him or her (as if you were giving the subject a pet -- but one that's not allergenic). If we get enough people we could actually make a project out of this. What do you think of the parameters so far?

Tell me what you think of this setup to determine if stuffed animals can be used to help Aspies. If you think this will work, I'll suggest it to the AANE and hopefully we can get a paper out of it.

First we need to make sure we have a uniform group of test subjects. We will therefore require that all subjects have an official diagnosis of Asperger's and are not taking any extra medication to handle any of their symptoms.

Each subject must also not be aware that he is part of the experiment. Therefore, all communication will not be with the Aspie but his or her friend or guardian. If the subject is a child, we'll talk to his or her parents. If the subject is an adult, we'll talk with his or her guardian or (if he's higher functioning) friend.

The experiment will start with a one-month interval where the guardian/friend will check to see how well the subject is doing without the animal (we'll use a questionnaire). Any important developments which could affect the subject's behavior during this period will be noted by the guardian so we can take them into account while determining a baseline for the subject. Meanwhile, the subject will be issued a little questionnaire to ask him or her describe his or her personality, ostensibly to figure out the typical personality of people with AS (which will be a side benefit of this project).

After the baseline has been established, the friend/guardian will present the subject with a stuffed animal as a gift. The same stuffed animal will be used in all the experiments (this will require that the AANE or whatever buy a bunch of identical stuffed otters or beavers or cats or whatever). He'll then watch the subject for the next month to see how the subject reacts to the animal. Finally, at the end of the month the friend will report the subject's progress back to the AANE, being careful to record everything that happened to the subject in the meantime (to make sure that a particular improvement wasn't due to a new medication or winning a million bucks or something like that).

In theory, we can use a few of control groups where the subject gets either no toy, a doll, or a Slinky. We had also discussed the possibility that someone other than the guardian/friend would evaluate the subject because someone told me that the guardian tends to think the subject did better even if he didn't (we need to remove that bias so we need a third person).

What do you think?

ACG

You might also add a control group of NT's that are given stuffed animals to see what, if any, changes to their lives it brings.

My son NEVER liked stuffed animals. Not sure why. He didn't want anything to do with them. It almost seemed like he was somewhat afraid of them (maybe).

I'm not quite sure what this will prove. Most children draw comfort from objects, though admittedly some more than others.

My youngest son has a major pet attraction and also a stuffed animal attraction. He also had a bit of a blanket fixation. He's HFA.

My eldest son who is dx Aspie, has more of an attraction to taking hard plastic transformers to bed. I'm not convinced that they're for comfort though, they may be there for sneaky nighttime play. At least, that's what it seems to be to me.

As a child, I had a major, major blanket issue. My poor mother had to take me shopping with my eiderdown stuffed into a shopping trolley. I also had lots of stuffed animals but I don't remember them as comfort things, more as friends with distinct personalities really.

You can't make a child form an attachment to an object. A child will form an attachment to an object on his or her own. An aspie/autie kid may well have an attachment to a Slinky, right? (I knew one kid that had a jumprope and one that had some plastic rings, for example. I had a blanket that I had to sleep with and stim with, but I also had a panda-shaped soapdish.)
I think the research would have to use an already-existing object; you could do some kind of seven-point Likert scale using NT and aspie/autie kids, asking variations on "how distressing is it to not have your [teddy bear, blankie, plastic rings]" - what do you think?

Actually, this reminds me of an article I read about parents going to extraordinary lengths to try to recreate a lost attachment object- like paying an exorbitant amount for the "same" blanket and all I could think of was, even if you were able to find the same one, it wouldn't be the same, wouldn't smell the same or be softened from "life" and use. Like when my Gramma (who had in fact made my special blanket) repaired the shredded parts, the patching was just all wrong, the parts were new and they were wrong...

Quit true. When I was a child I slept with a wooden yo-yo that my dad got in Germany sometimes. One of my Aspie male cousins slept with a pair of leather gloves.

You can't force Aspie bonding to stuffed animals unless you find a group already attached to them. There's another glitch with the idea... I don't know about these days, but when I was a kid doctors told parents to take away stuffed animals from kids who had allergies because the dustmites on them caused asthma attacks. Many autistics have allergies and asthma so they may not be allowed to have a stuffed animal.

I had hordes of teddy bears. At one point I could even remember all of their names and would hand out report cards for all of them. *whistles*

Course, then again, I had the serious obsession with matchbox cars as well.