Delusional aversion in special needs: maladaptive learning?

As #1 moves to adulthood he shows many cognitive improvements — including better planning abilities. Improvements in some areas inevitably expose disabilities in other areas; we must then choose which to work on and which to wait on.One of those newly defined disabilities is something we have started to call “delusional aversion”. For example - a sudden, inexplicable and emotionally intense aversion to a mountain biking site. If you didn’t know him better you’d think some terrible and unspeakable secret trauma had occurred there. That does not seem to be the case — though we can’t rule out some minor issue like someone speaking sharply to him, or some brushing grass creating an unpleasant sensation.Once these aversions develop they are strong and persistent. You could not, for example, pay him enough to put a big bag under his bike seat. He will often produce “explanations” for the aversion, but they are illogical. If pressed he will respond with angry speech. They are classic “fixed beliefs without rational explanation” — delusions in other words. I suspect they are structurally not all that different from the well studied delusions of schizophrenia and they, of course, are very much like phobias.We think of these delusional aversions as a form of dysfunctional associative learning. He associates something unpleasant with a location (human memories are strongly bound to place), and his disability rapidly amplifies a “single-exposure” learning circ...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - Category: Disability Tags: adolescence adult behavioral therapy brain and mind cognition cognitive impairment Source Type: blogs