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Asperger's Patients, Can They Learn Social Skills? - Dr. Volkmar (VIDEO)
By
Dr. Fred Volkmar
Expert
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Dr. Volkmar shares if people with Asperger's syndrome are capable of learning social skills.
Dr. Volkmar:
Asperger’s patients often have strong social interest, interestingly, but they lack the wherewithal to carry it off in the real world because they are very one-sided; they are very eccentric. So one of the things, especially if the child is motivated, you can teach very explicitly some social rules, and you can do all kinds of interventions, and again because the person is verbal, you can use the verbal interventions as well, and that’s a route for them. Sometimes that can be very successful. They can learn a lot of rules.
Now most of these rules most of us would take automatically and we don’t have to be explicitly taught, but for the kid with Asperger’s, the explicit teaching can be very, very helpful.
About Dr. Volkmar, M.D.:
Fred Volkmar, M.D. is the director of the Yale University Child Study Center and Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology at Yale University, where he heads the university's autism research and autism clinic. He is also Chief of Child Psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital. His research focuses on understanding the fundamental nature of autism and developing better guidelines to diagnose autism and related conditions.
Visit Dr. Volkmar at Yale University School of Medicine