Simon Baron-Cohen
Simon Baron-Cohen is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the Director of the University’s Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. He formulated the fetal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015. Critics have suggested that his views on autism and sex differences are controversial.
About Simon Baron-Cohen in brief
Simon Baron-Cohen is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the Director of the University’s Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. He formulated the fetal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015. He has also made major contributions to the fields of typical cognitive sex differences, autism prevalence and screening, autism genetics, autism neuroimaging, autism and technical ability, and synaesthesia. Critics have suggested that his views on autism and sex differences are controversial. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in London. His cousins include the actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and the composer Erran Baron Cohen. He married Bridget Lindley, a family rights lawyer whom he had met at Oxford, in 1987. She died of breast cancer in 2016. Baron- cohen has three children, the eldest of whom is screenwriter and director Sam Baron. He completed a BA degree in Human Sciences at New College, Oxford, and an MPhil degree in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London.
He received a PhD degree in Psychology at University College London; his doctoral research was in collaboration with his supervisor Uta Frith. In his 2004 book Prenatal Testosterone in Mind, Baron-cohen put forward the prenatal sex steroid Theory of autism. He proposed this theory to understand why autism is more common in males. His work in E-S theory led him to investigate whether higher levels of prenatal testosterone explain the increased rate of autism among males. He found that in typical children, amount of eye contact, rate of vocabulary development, quality of social relationships, theory of mind performance, and scores on the Empathy Quotient are all inversely correlated with prenatal testosterone levels. In 2015 and 2019, he found elevated prenatal androgens estrogens are associated with autism. This has been replicated by a Swedish group and is in line with the finding that mothers with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) have elevated levels of sex steroid hormones. But Baron- Cohen needed a much larger sample to really test the theory.
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