Rdos blog

I’ve made a new research project with some promising possibilities. I went through all 1,800 questions that has been in Aspie Quiz looking for gender bias in the Aspie population where there was none in the neurotypical population (or a reversed bias). While there are quite a few questions that have a gender bias in both populations (a rough estimate is at least 10%, or several hundred questions), it was far harder to find a gender bias only in the Aspie population. I ended up with a list of 47 possible questions. Some of these were discarded based on other datasets, while some were already a permanent part of final version 2 of Aspie Quiz. I tested 36 of the questions in Aspie Quiz to try to confirm the gender bias. It turned out that 17 of these did have a gender bias in the new dataset (with a little more than 9,000 answers), a majority of which was related to female Aspies.

The following issues were biased in the male population:

• Is it harder for you than for others to get over a failed relationship? (Aspie social group)
• Do you believe in love at first sight? (Aspie social group)

The following issues were biased in the female population:

• Do you flap your hands (e.g. when excited or upset)? (Aspie communication group)
• Do you rock back-&-forth or side-to-side (e.g. for comfort, to calm yourself, when excited or overstimulated)? (Aspie communication group)
• Do you enjoy hanging upside down? (Aspie hunting group)
• Do you enjoy walking on your toes? (Aspie hunting group)
• Do you have a fascination for slowly flowing water? (Aspie hunting group)
• Do you have an urge to observe the habits of animals? (Aspie hunting group)
• Have you experienced stronger than normal attachments to certain people? (Aspie social group)
• Do you have an alternative view of what is attractive in the opposite sex compared to most others? (Aspie social group)
• Do you prefer to have friends of the opposite gender? (Aspie social group)
• If you have to be touched, do you prefer it to be firmly rather than lightly? (Aspie perception group)
• Do you dislike being hugged when you haven’t asked for it? (NT social group)
• Do you have an urge to observe the habits of humans? (Aspie hunting, Aspie social, Aspie communication groups)
• Do you have an urge to learn the routines of people you know? (Aspie communication, Aspie compulsion, Aspie social groups)
• Do you naturally fit into the expected gender stereotypes? (reversed, NT compulsion, Aspie social groups)
• Are you asexual? (Aspie social, NT social, NT communication, Aspie perception groups)

 Basically, all the biased questions are primarily linked to Aspie groups (15 of 17), with the exceptions needing further research in order to find the key trait. For instance, being asexual is related to many different groups, so is probably a result of several factors, but one of them should be a key Aspie trait. Asexual also has a considerable correlation to dislike for touch / hugs, which is also biased in a similar fashion, and relates to both sensory issues and NT social issues.  

In summary, it seems like the traits are related to three different domains:

1. Gender bias in hunting adaptations (Aspie hunting group)
2. Gender bias in mating behavior (Aspie social group)
3. Gender bias in nonverbal communication (Aspie communication group)

The gender biases in hunting behavior might mean that Neanderthal females had some specific hunting roles, namely to keep track of animals and their behavior.

The gender bias in mating behavior needs further research. It is clear that both genders experience stronger attachments than normal, and that this seems to give different outcomes with males bonding quicker and having more failures in relationships. A key research area is to elaborate on why asexuality is biased only in the female Aspie population.

The gender bias in nonverbal communication provide key traits that might be used to signal interest. Research on this in the neurotypical population seems to show that females have some unique courtship behaviors, which might have some parallels in the Aspie population, but the two would probably be largely incompatible.

23andme, a company that sells genetic tests to individuals, has developped a Neanderthal heritage estimator: http://spittoon.23andme.com/2011/12/15/find-your-inner-neanderthal/. This estimator uses factor analysis on all the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, currently almost 1 million) that are part of their genetic test. This means we would expect the estimator to give a good indication of the SNPs that were introduced from Neanderthal after they met modern humans some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. They use native Africans as a control group, so any SNPs that have spread to the whole world would be discarded. Any SNPs that were introduced earlier would also be discarded.

So how does this estimator correlate to neurodiversity (Aspie) score in Aspie Quiz? We would expect a large correlation if recently introduced SNPs from Neanderthal could explain most of today’s human diversity, but this is not the case. With a material of 167 people of European descent (out of totally 94,000) that did both Aspie Quiz and 23andme, there is a correlation of 0.12. That means that p < 0.07 that there is no relation between 23andme Neanderthal heritage percentage and Aspie Quiz scores (and that there is 93% probability that they are related).

So it does seem like 23andme Neanderthal heritage estimator does support the Neanderthal theory, but the correlation is much smaller than what we would expect. There could be many reasons for this low correlation, but the major reason is probably that science has not found any single SNP that could explain more than 1% of ASD. Since ASDs have no large relation to SNPs, we would not expect it to have a large correlation to any SNP-based genetic data. The largest genetic correlation is with Copy Number Variation (CNVs), but the Neanderthal genome does not include CNVs, and is composed of many small fragments that could prove hard to analyse in the context of CNVs.

Some further break-down of the data reveal other interesting insights. It seems like some questions in Aspie Quiz have larger correlation to 23andme than others. It is especially notable that questions related to Neurotypical compulsions and Aspie hunting seem to have considerably higher correlations to 23andme than others. These issues are atypical in the analysis of Aspie Quiz since they have too low diversity in relation to the number of different issues they cover. They seem to be recent evolution in modern humans (Neurotypical compulsion) and Neanderthal (Aspie hunting). This can explain why the correlation is lower than expected. What the 23andme estimator calculate is recent evolution in modern humans and Neanderthal, but most of the diversity in Aspie Quiz is much older than the 250,000 years that Neanderthal existed. In fact, Aspie Quiz suggests that neurodiversity is close to 2 million years old, meaning that only 10-15% of neurodiversity would be anticipated to have evolved in Neanderthal, while the other traits evolved in their ancestors in Eurasia.

But why then do 23andme mainly detect recent human evolution, and not the more ancient evolution of neurodiversity in Eurasia? Most likely because some of this diversity has spread one way or another back to Africa during the last two million years, and when the SNPs already exist in some (possibly low) proportion among Africans, 23andme would discard them as not of Neanderthal origin.

Similiarily as the physical traits, it should be possible to discriminate Aspies from neurotypicals based on brain anatomy. There is a recent study on this subject here: http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/30/32/10612.

The popular press makes it sound like psychiatry has finally found the brain defect that will enable us to diagnose ASDs on physical  traits, and in the end identify the defect and dispose of it. This is hardly what the study found.

The study found that if 20 people with ASDs and 20 neurotypicals where mass-surveyed for every possible anatomical difference, they were able to place them in the correct category with very high confidence.

The method used looks an awfully lot like the factor-analysis method that Aspie-quiz used to obtain weight factors for being Aspie and neurotypical, and which made it possible to classify people without a maunal scoring algorithm. The researchers have basically replicated the Aspie-quiz method, albeit with a data-set of 40 where Aspie-quiz used 150,000.

The results seems similar as well. They found that no single difference can provide good discrimination between groups, but instead there is a need to use many different meassures. These were related to volume and  geometry, and existed in many different areas of the brain  and in both hemispheres  (even if one were more relevant than the other). This is what Aspie-quiz found as well. There was a need for about 150 diverse personality-traits in order to make good judgements for people’s Aspie-NT profile.

The study also found that ADHD was less well defined, which is expected when ADHD is mostly related to a single dimension in the Aspie profile (Aspie social).

This kind of distribution of many different brain differences being related to ASCs is what the Neanderthal theory expects us to see. The authors provide no real theory for how their findings could be explained, but the Neanderthal theory explains it very well.

It is necesary to point out that the small sample size and large amount of differences tested makes this a data-mining project with many possible problems. In the worse scenario, a new sample of 20+20 individuals might fail totally in placing participants in the correct groups if the differences found are only particular to the subjects used.

The new Aspie social group has now been incorporated into Aspie-quiz. It basically contains the previous sexuality & relationship, activity and paranoia groups.  Several issues that previously didn’t group has also been added to Aspie social.

So what exactly is Aspie social, and how does the social environment of Aspies work?

Here is one cluster:

1. Partner obsessions
2. Unusual sexual preferences
3. Being more sexually attracted to strangers than to people one knows well
4. Being asexual
5. Having compulsive sexual behavior
6. Being in love with more than one person at the same time
7. Similar attitudes towards faithfulness as NTs

These traits seems somewhat incompatible. So, how do these traits actually go together? First, a guess of what might be included in “unusual sexual preferences” might be in order. Previous research has ruled out that unusual sexual preferences is mainly HBT (homo-, bi- and transsexuality), because these have too low relevance to be able to explain it (if they have any relevance at all). More likely unusual sexual preferences are paraphilias.

Number 1 and 7 combined seems to be typical long-term relationships. Number 2, 3 and 5 are probably “contact” behaviors, especially since they are expressed towards strangers and not towards already bonded partners. 6 seems to indicate that several partner obsessions can be present at the same time, and thus that bonding isn’t  necesarily related to monogamous practises.

Here are some other social behaviors:

1. Trouble with authority
2. Expecting others to have the same friends and enemies as oneself
3. Always wanting to be with ones partner
4. A preference to find ones own niche in life and doing things oneself
5. A preference to hyperfocus on things, and needing a lot of motivation to getting started with things
6. A preference for animals over people

These also does not seem fully consistent at a first look, but somehow it must possible to explain why these are related.

Number 1 seems to be a preference for a non-leadership, flat organizational model. This model in fact is frequently seen in computer companies, and many Aspies seem to work in such environments, and apparantly influence the choice of organization model at these companies.  Number 4,5 and 6 all indicate individualistic preferences, but how do these go together with 2 and 3? I think a good guess is that the preference is to actually be close to other people that one is bonded to, while still doing lots of things on one own. This is not as inconsistent as it might seem. This can be observed in working, long-time relationships between Aspies.

But how is asexuality from above related to all of this? Probably because as people become bonded to each others, the sexual interest declines. When the bond is developped, sex is only for reproduction. This can easily be misinterpreted as being asexual! Another thing is that asexuality has a certain relation to environmental issues, and thus can be the thing as asexuality in deprived animals in captivity.

This has some important implications for relationships:

1. Unlike in typical relationships, the lack of sex in an Aspie-Aspie relationship is a good sign, and not a bad one.
2. When Aspies are in relationships with neurotypicals, they need to consider the preference of neurotypicals that sex is what keeps the bond alive (or the neurotypical partner needs to understand that his/her partner is not disinterested in the relationship because of the lack of sexual interest).
3. Aspies needs to have their “time-alone” while still having their partner nearby.

Finally, a few other social traits:

1. Unusual eating patterns
2. Unusual sleeping patterns
3. Lesser motivation to stay clean
4. Feelings that cycle between hopelessness and high confidence
5. A highly variable activity level
6. Getting depressed during winter-time

These things seems to be related to way of life in a seasonal environment with highly variable food availability.

A final warning is in order here. Not all Aspies have these social preferences, and some instead work just like any neurotypical in this regard. However, it is important to understand that some Aspies are like this, and that people can make things easier for them by accepting their preferences if possible, or explain how people usually are so they can adapt.

A while ago I checked Tony Attwoods “Aspie criteria” in Aspie-quiz. The statements were reformulated as questions and added as experimental questions (and thus were mixed-up with ordinary questions). It was done like this so people would answer them truthfully. Attwoods statements have mixed relevance, with a few highly relevant statements, and some with absolutely no relevance.

Very good relevance (more than 0.6 in correlation to Aspie-score)

• Do you have acute sensitivity to specific sensory experiences and stimuli (e.g. hearing, touch, vision, and/or smell)?

Good relevance (between 0.45 and 0.59 in correlation)

• Do you dislike discussing a topic that may not be of primary interest?
• Do you have an strong preferece for detail over gestalt?
• Do you have an original, often unique perspective in problem solving?
• Do you have an avid perseverance in gathering and cataloguing information on a topic of interest?
• Do you have knowledge of routines and a focused desire to maintain order and accuracy?

Some relevance (between 0.3 and 0.44 in correlation)

• Do you speak your mind irrespective of social context or adherence to personal beliefs?
• Do you seek an audience or friends capable of enthusiasm for unique interests and topics?
• Are you primarily interested in significant contributions to conversation over ritualistic small talk or socially trivial statements and superficial conversation?
• Do you prefer conversation free of hidden meaning or agenda?
• Do you have an advanced use of pictorial metaphors?
• Do you have exceptional memory and/or recall of details often forgotten or disregarded by others, for example: names, dates, schedules, routines?
• Are your thoughts persistent?
• Do you have encyclopaedic or “CD ROM” knowledge of one or more topics?
• Are you values/decision making unaltered by political or financial factors?
• Are you a “social unsung hero” with trusting optimism: frequent victim of social weaknesses of others, while steadfast in the belief of the possibility of genuine friendship?

Insignificant relavance (between 0.15 and 0.29 in correlation)

• Do you show absolute loyalty and impeccable dependability in peer relationships?
• Are you determined to seek the truth?
• Do you have an advanced vocabulary and interest in words?
• Are you fascinated with word-based humor (e.g. puns)?
• Do you often take care of others outside the range of typical development?

No relevance (less than 0.15 in correlation)

• Are you free of sexist, “age-ist” or culturalist biases and regard others at “face value”?
  
• Do you have the ability to pursue personal theory or perspective despite conflicting evidence?
  
• Do you listen without continual judgement or assumption?
  
• Do you seek sincere, positive, genuine friends with an unassuming sense of humor?
  
• Are you good at individual sports and games, particularly those involving endurance or visual accuracy, including rowing, swimming, bowling, chess?
  
• Have you attended university after high school?

Most of the statements are related to Aspie talent, which is expected.

It is claimed in publications about the validity of the AQ test by Simon-Baron Cohen that 80% of diagnosed AS will score in the Autistic range while only 2% of controls will. This seems to indicate a very reliable test with good discriminitative power.

The cutoff to “very likely Aspie” in Aspie-quiz was originally set in version 7 to provide similar properties for diagnosed AS/HFA/PDD as the AQ test (80% would get their diagnosis confirmed). The control groups in Aspie-quiz however has much higher amount of “very likely Aspie” than the AQ tests 2% (the average is around 16%). This seems to indicate much worse discriminitative power of Aspie-quiz.

To evaluate relative discriminative power between the AQ test and Aspie-quiz it is necesary to administrer both tests to the same population. This has been done twice in Aspie-quiz. The first time was in version R4 (an early experimental version) and the second was in version F1 (the first final version).

Results from R4:

• 81% of diagnosed AS/HFA score above the cutoff in the AQ test compared to 75% in Aspie-quiz (6% difference)
• 66% of all males score above the cutoff in the AQ test compared to 58% in Aspie-quiz (8% difference)
• 50% of all females score above the cutoff in the AQ test compared to 43% in Aspie-quiz (7% difference)

Results from F1:

• 59% of diagnosed AS/HFA/PDD score above the cutoff in the AQ test compared to 70% in Aspie-quiz (11% difference)
• 42% of all males score above the cutoff in the AQ test compared to 46% in Aspie-quiz (4% difference)
• 45% of all females score above the cutoff in the AQ test compared to 50% in Aspie-quiz (5% difference)
• 16% in the NT control group score above the cuttoff in the AQ test compared to 19% in Aspie-quiz (3% difference)

In version R4, the AQ test consistently gave higher scores in all groups (but primarily in the whole group and the male group). In version F1, Aspie-quiz consistently gave higher scores in all groups (but primarily in the diagnosed and female group and to a lesser extent in the whole group and the control group). These findings seems to show that Aspie-quiz has slightly higher discriminative power than the AQ test.

The correlation between score difference in Aspie-quiz and AQ score is 0.83 in both R4 and F1.

The AQ test was developped specifically with the DSM definition of AS in mind, while the intention of Aspie-quiz is to identify positive, autistic personality-traits in adults. We would thus expect the AQ test to have much better discriminative power for AS/HFA than Aspie-quiz, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Why is this? A hint is that six questions in the AQ test has no relevance whatsoever for Autism.

These questions are:

• If I try to imagine something, I find it very easy to create a picture in my mind.
• When I’m reading a story, I can easily imagine what the characters might look like.
• I find making up stories easy.
• I am not very good at remembering phone numbers.
• I don’t usually notice small changes in a situation or a person’s appearance.
• I am not very good at remembering people’s date of birth.

Some of the above issues were early stereotypes put forward by some autism-researchers that Autistics would lack imagination, which of course is not at all true. Another 2-3 questions related to pretending also have very weak relevance.

When 12% of the questions in the AQ test lacks relevance for Autism, it is not that strange that Aspie-quiz can do a better job at discriminating AS/HFA.

The AQ test also focuses only on six of the twelve groups in Aspie-quiz’ spider-diagram. These are:

• Neurotypical social
• Neurotypical communication
• Aspie compulsion
• Aspie ability
• Neurotypical ability
• Aspie perception (one question only)

It does not have any relevant questions for:

• Aspie activity
• Aspie hunting
• Aspie communication
• Neurotypical compulsion
• Neurotypical hunting
• Neurotypical perception

Here are two pretty revealing questions about friendships:

1. Do you prefer to have friends of the opposite gender?
2. Are friends of the same gender important to you?

One would expect these to be opposites, and they are. Their linkage to Aspie and/or neurotypical scores seems less obvious. Without deeper knowledge about this, it would be hard to believe any of them are relevant to being Aspie or neurotypical. The fact is that 1 is related to Aspie score and 2 is related to neurotypical score.

The traits related to a preference to have friends of the same gender are in the neurotypical compulsion group, and especially Do you prefer the company of those of the same generation as yourself? So, neurotypicals seems to have a preference to socialize in same-age groups and primarily with people of the same gender when it comes to friendships and with the opposite gender for relationships. This is hardly news as these traits cannot be missed in society.

The question about a preference to have friends of the opposite gender has different relations. It is related to:

1. Have you experienced stronger than normal attachments to certain people?
2. Do you tend to lean towards your partner when you are at a restaurant or party?
3. Do you tend to become obsessed with a potential partner and cannot let go of him/her?

These are the partner-obsession traits previously analysed in Aspie relationships. These traits group in the environmental group and in the Aspie communication group. They are related to environmental traits like depression because they give big problems in a society that think friendships are between peers of the same gender. The relation to Aspie communication is probably the natural connection.

These results have implications about how the natural social environment of Aspies work. If it is not based on same-gender, age-matched friendships, how does it work? A good guess might be that friendships does not even exist in the natural Aspie environment. What does exist is group-bonding, and the bonds primarily seem to exist between people of the opposite gender. A good guess would also be that what looks like opposite gender friendships naturally develop into relationships over time. This is why this trait is related to relationship questions. The previous finding that being in love in more than one person at the time is an Aspie relationship-type-of-trait fits nicely into the picture, because this indeed indicates a group-bonded social context rather than a monogamous, male-female social context.

Other indicative traits are these:

1. Do you prefer to only meet people you know, one-on-one, or in small, familiar groups?
2. Do you feel uncomfortable with strangers?

The above traits also indicate a preference for being with the same people all the time, and being reluctant to socialize with strangers. However, they do not point in the direction of a single male-female social context which exist in other primate species. These traits taken together point to a closed group social environment with no pair-bonding within.

As with the relationship traits, the correlation with Aspie score is weak, and thus this way of functioning cannot be generalized to the whole group.

A fundamental property of questions in Aspie-quiz is how they are related to each others. There is a general tendency for questions that have good relevance for Aspie/neurotypical scores (have a high correlation with scores) to also have high average correlation with other questions. This is shown in the following diagram which plots score correlation (x-axis) versus average correlation with other questions (y-axis) for 1,370 questions:

This property is very important for grouping questions and finding clusters in the dataset. As can also be seen above, if a question have high correlation with score, it will inevitably be correlated to about anything you want to ask. This is a common mistake in psychiatric research, and especially in research that includes Aspie traits. In fact, it is possible to group Aspie traits in about any collection of syndromes if the only criteria for traits to belong together  is that they are correlated to each others.

Another way to show this is by plotting score correlation (x-axis) versus highest correlation with all other questions (y-axis):

A similar thing appears. Questions with high score correlation will seldom have low correlation with all other questions.

These findings have important implications for finding clusters. Instead of finding clusters by only looking at correlations, which will give too small clusters if questions have low score correlation and too large clusters if questions have high score correlation, another method is needed. What is needed is to compare correlations with score correlation. So, when presenting correlated questions to a specific question, one should not use a absolute correlation cutoff, but rather a relative cutoff. Using 80% of score correlation as a cutoff usually works quite well and gives good clusters regardless of a questions score correlation.

This also works in the reverse way. If a set of questions is put together, and it is found that they are highly dependent on each others (without being identical), this is an indication that these questions are measuring Aspie traits.

I recently researched love and relationships in Aspie-quiz. First I added a number of typical romantic questions from a swedish quiz posted on aspergerforum.se. These questions didn’t go very well and showed mixed relevance. While the traditional romantic questions seemed at least weakly linked, they showed no consistent linkage with the Aspie/neurotypical dimension. Instead, some questions were linked to neurotypical compulsion (“Do you enjoy a good love story?”) while others seemed linked to Aspie communication (“Do you tend to lean towards your partner when you are at a restaurant or party?”).

Something needed to be done to resolve this. Therefore I added another nine questions from older versions of Aspie-quiz that seemed to be related to the topic of love and relationships. This seemed to clear up the issue.

The primarily linked questions now are these (intercorrelations are in  range 0.4-0.55 which is much higher than between romantic questions that have 0.2-0.3):

1. Is it harder for you than for others to get over a failed relationship?
2. Have you experienced stronger than normal attachments to certain people?
3. Do you tend to become obsessed with a potential partner and cannot let go of him/her?
4. Do you refuse to give up on a relationship or potential relationship that others would not bother with?

Here 2 and 3 seems to be the primary traits, while 1 and 4 are problems these causes in a non-Aspie adapted world. Both 2 and 3 have simlar relevance (a little above 0.4 correlation with Aspie-score), and are best related to each others and to the problems 1 and 4. This means that Aspie attachment to people is mostly related to obsessions with a potential partner (partner obsession) rather than to other compulsive traits. One can imagine this behavior can lead to stalking when combined with other traits.

Now, using these now established Aspie-traits one can look at linkage for other traits in the romance quiz. First, let’s look at the trait above characterized as linked to Aspie communication (“Do you tend to lean towards your partner when you are at a restaurant or party?”). It is linked to the following traits:

1. Do you refuse to give up on a relationship or potential relationship that others would not bother with?
2. Do you save love-letters?
3. Is it harder for you than for others to get over a failed relationship?
4. Have you experienced stronger than normal attachments to certain people?
5. Do you tend to become obsessed with a potential partner and cannot let go of him/her?

It seems evident that this trait is related to the partner obsession trait from above.  It also shows linkage to one of the core romantic traits (2).

Finally, looking at the core romantic traits, it is evident that these clusters are also related to partner obsession. The romantic cluster looks like this:

1. Do you save love-letters?
2. Do you enjoy a good love story?
3. Have you and a partner ever had a song of your own?
4. Is it harder for you than for others to get over a failed relationship?
5. Do you refuse to give up on a relationship or potential relationship that others would not bother with?
6. Do you tend to become obsessed with a potential partner and cannot let go of him/her?
7. Do you tend to lean towards your partner when you are at a restaurant or party?
8. Do you hope to meet the “right one”?
9. Do you believe in fate when it comes to love?

This seems to show that romantic traits really can be said to be Aspie in nature, but because Aspies have so many failures in relationships many of the individual traits shows no significant correlation to Aspie score (and in some cases shows correlation to neurotypical score). To research it, linkage studies between traits are needed, and partner obsession must be taken into account. Romantic love in fact seems to be a form of partner obsession.

Another (odd) cluster is this:

1. Have you been in love with more than one person at the same time?
2. Have you experienced stronger than normal attachments to certain people?

Contrary to the traditional view of romantic love, partner obsession doesn’t seem to be a monogamous thing. Here being in love with several people at the same time is shown to be related to partner obsession.

There are some other clusters related to sexuality as well:

1. If you were single, would you find casual sex (one-night stands) rewarding?
2. Do you have compulsive sexual behavior, e.g. spend too much time on sex or switch sexual partner frequently?

Finding these traits positively correlated is rather strange because 1 is correlated to neurotypical score while 2 is correlated to Aspie score. However, here it is also necesary to look at opportunity. Aspies seldom can persue casual sex and this is pretty much why they answer this question negatively. It is an issue of opportunity. The second question doesn’t need a real partner, but can be persued with pornography.

A final cluster shows how these traits are related to other sexuality issues in Aspie-quiz:

1. Do you have compulsive sexual behavior, e.g. spend too much time on sex or switch sexual partner frequently?
2. Do you have unusual sexual preferences?
3. Have you have had long-lasting urges to take revenge?
4. Are you hypo- or hypersensitive to physical pain, or even enjoy some types of pain?
5. Do you tend to say things that are considered socially inappropriate?

Compulsive sexual behavior is related to unusual sexual preferences. It is also related to an urge to take revenge (this could be the missing trait that creates the stalker).

So what does this mean for the average Aspie? Not much as the correlation with Aspie score is weak. What it does show is that romatic traits must have been part of the original Aspie profile before these traits diluted into the general population. It also shows that the romantic traits did not evolve in a simple male-female monogamous environment.