Date of Award

Spring 5-31-2026

Document Type

Open Access Honors Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Art (BA)

Department

Psychology

Advisor

Alice Carter

Director

Leonard von Morze

Subject Categories

Child Psychology | Developmental Psychology | Disability Studies

Abstract

The first known documentation of the syndrome we today refer to as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was published by Austrian psychiatrist Leo Kanner (1943), who identified a cluster of disordered symptoms among 11 young children, which he termed “early infantile autism”. Consequently, the psychiatric world became aware of autism as its own disorder separate from schizophrenia or “childhood psychosis” (Wing, 1997). Since then, the ways in which autism is studied, diagnosed, referred to, defined, and treated have seen drastic changes (Blacher & Christensen, 2011) over the course of almost a century. It is only natural that the perceptions held by researchers, as well as by the public on a societal scale, about autism and autistic individuals have also evolved in various ways. Today, autism is generally understood as a neurological and developmental disorder whose symptoms manifest heterogeneously among individuals, but which often interferes with the ways in which affected individuals behave, communicate, learn, and interact with others (National Institute of Mental Health, 2024).

Comments

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