Developmental social vulnerability as the intrinsic origin of psychopathology: A paradigm shift from disease entities to psychiatric derivatives within human diversity.

How a social episode is perceived by a person and how the experience affects her/his subsequent behaviors will inevitably and sometimes accidentally vary in each case on the developmental trajectory from the birth of consciousness to death. Both the preceding developmental conditions and the social impact of the episode become a starting point for the following states of human complex conditions, creating the extraordinary diversity that characterizes our complex society. In this evolutionarily carved landscape, genetic factors including stochastic epistasis, environmental modification, and gene-environment interactions are all active. In these processes, interactions between developmental social vulnerability and environmental influences can lead to the emergence and persistence of some derivative states with social maladaptation. In our model, every psychiatric condition including aberrant paranoid-hallucinatory states is classified as a derivative state. The probability distribution curve for these derivative states has a non-linear relationship with the liability in the population, and there is none with probability 1.0 or zero. Individuals with trivial social vulnerability or high resilience may develop the derivative states in tremendously stressful circumstances, and individuals with huge social vulnerability may not necessarily develop the derivative states in the presence of adequate social supports. Social skillfulness/unskillfulness and behavioral flexibility/inflexibility form the core of the vulnerability-related dimensions. The clinical picture of a derivative manifestation is profiled depending on the individual trait levels in the derivative-related dimensions. Each derivative state has a requisite lineup of dimensions and each dimension can contribute to multiple psychiatric conditions. For example, aberrant paranoid-hallucinatory states and bipolar condition may share some developmental conditions as the derivative-related dimensions. Therefore, multiple derivative states can co-occur or be sequentially comorbid. Although the 'learned strategies' can ostensibly mask the clinical manifestation of developmental deviations, the change of the true dimensional position to the socially skillful direction is efficiently obtained through social experiences in a supportive environment. The liability-probability model makes it impossible to discriminate individuals with psychiatric diagnosis from individuals without the diagnosis and allows all of us to reside in the same human complex diversity.

Computerized lifelong mentoring support using robot for autistic individuals.

Developmental diversity in childhood is transformed into personality variation in adulthood. This view is now revalued through an ongoing paradigm shift in the field of developmental conditions, the transition from the qualitative dichotomy perspective to the quantitative concept. In the quantitative concept, autism is not a disease nor a developmental qualitative disorder, but a behavioral extreme in individual variation. Although the traditional qualitative view cannot interpret the recent worldwide prevalence of autism, the increase in the reported number of cases with autism and border cases can be easily explained by a dimensional exploration in which the primary autistic phenotype is regarded as an evolutional superiority. Therefore, the only suitable intervention is mentoring which provides a powerful lifelong support for higher social achievement in individuals with autism. Here, we hypothesize the coming mentoring circumstances for autistic individuals in the near future. Ongoing progress in robot and computer technology might allow the guardians to leave the major part of mentoring support to an individualized robot, and the 'folk physics' tendency in individuals with autism could facilitate the spread of the mentoring support system. The development of the robot mentor software may be simple because of the uniformity and stereotypy of the behavior patterns in individuals with autism. With the help of the robot mentor and under its guidance, autistic people might enjoy their social life and contribute to the prosperity of the human society to the maximum degree. Because the future population ratio of autistics/non-autistics might be reversed according to the current trend of the prevalence, mentoring robot programs for autistic individuals should be developed without delay as a novel preliminary activity in the Jiminy Cricket movement, which is a campaign to reverse the estrangement of the present majority from autism and to increase the number of mentors for autistic individuals. In this article, prerequisites for the mentoring program of the robot mentor are expected and discussed.