42 Copyright © 2015, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 3 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-7373-1.ch003 Supporting Communication between People with Social Orientation Impairments Using Affective Computing Technologies: Rethinking the Autism Spectrum ABSTRACT A disability is a physical or mental impairment that has an adverse long-term impact on someone’s abil- ity to carry out normal day-to-day activities. This is often thought of in terms of medical conditions with clearly defned symptoms. This chapter, however, argues that it is these symptoms that can be considered to be the impairments and that in the right environment can in fact be advantageous. Someone may be have a medical diagnosis but not be symptomatic due to medication, for instance. In this chapter, a set of symptoms is made up from a number of diferent scales, called Social-Behavioural Traits (SBTs), which are afected by a person’s Serotonergic-Dopamagenic Asynchronicity (SDA). This chapter discusses the role of afective computing in achieving harmony between people with various personality diferences, including a model for explaining how technology can infuence SDA and SBTs for the better. INTRODUCTION It has been said that the number of people with autism is increasing - or is it that the number of people diagnosed with autism is increasing? It is now abundantly clear that autism is a complex neurodevelopmental condition with underlying organic genetic and neurological differences, and is not caused by parenting deficiencies (Kientz, Goodwin, Hayes & Abowd, 2013). If one con- sidered that autism is not so much a disability, but a personality type, then one could argue that Jonathan Bishop The European Parliament, Belgium