Found this here http://aspieperspective.blogspot.com/2009/04/stimming-autistic-and-nt.html while googling 'stimming', heres the except that I find fascinating:
Discounting children's use of rocking horses and adults in rocking chairs, there's one circumstance in which NTs frequently rock. When they're given extremely distressing news (e.g. the death of a loved one), many individuals will have a reaction that's quite familiar to many autistics. Specifically, they will start crying, almost hold themselves, and start to rock back and forth. Despite the extreme circumstances, this rocking serves almost the exact same function as it does in autistics: it's a soothing motion, one that helps the individual cope with an extreme emotion.
In NTs, head-hitting and head-banging is usually reserved for moments of extreme frustration or what I like to refer to as "D'oh!" moments. While NTs usually don't engage in this behavior with the same intensity (or frequency) that many autistics have been known to, that is a quantitative, not qualitative, difference.
Hand-flapping also follows this pattern. If you've ever watched videos of people as they are informed that they won the lottery (or Publisher's Clearinghouse sweepstakes, etc.), you probably know what I mean: many people in such circumstances jump up and down, waving their hands excitedly... in a manner quite familiar to most in the autism and autistic communities.
Finally, object-spinning is mostly a matter of autistic children (which is to say that autistic adults don't do it nearly as much). Parallels in NT children are pathetically easy to find. Simply put, neurotypical children like spinning toys. Autistic kids like to spin toys... including spinning toys.
So does that mean Autistic people just have stronger emotions, or express stimming at lower levels of those emotions?
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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