This meta-analysis examined correlations between eye-tracking measures of gaze behaviors manifested during dynamic salient social stimuli and behavioral assessment measures of social communication skills of young autistic children. We employed a multilevel model with random effects to perform three separate meta-analyses for correlation between…

When partners coordinate their movement in time and space to reach a goal, they perform joint action, an important part of every interaction. Joint action involves motor abilities and socio-cognitive skills like theory of mind. Autistic children's lower joint motor coordination (joint action) abilities as well as their motor functioning and theory…

Purpose: Conversational latency entails the temporal feature of turn-taking, which is understudied in autistic children. The current study investigated the influences of child-based and parental factors on conversational latency in autistic children with heterogeneous spoken language abilities. Method: Participants were 46 autistic children aged…

The socialisation of adolescent boys and girls takes place primarily online in virtual environments, where cyberbullying is one of the greatest current social dangers faced by that age group. Socio-emotional e-competencies (i.e., competencies that apply specifically to online environments) are a protective factor against cyberaggression and…

Research Findings: Empathy plays an important role in children's early social-emotional development. However, there are not many instruments available for measuring the different aspects/levels of empathy in preschool children. Moreover, few studies examined the validity of the existing measures for empathy in Chinese children. The present study…

The knowledge-based economy and the information society highlights the importance of developing new competencies for personal, professional and social integration. Problem-solving in technologically rich environments (PS-TREs) is one of these competencies. This research examines the relationships between higher education and the PS-TREs…

Purpose: Follow-up studies of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in early childhood that focus on friendship formation during adolescence are scarce. The present study focused on exploring characteristics possibly related to the ability to establish friendships during adolescence among children diagnosed with ASD in…

Social interaction depends on turn-taking and adapting to one's conversational partner, yet little is known about the typical and atypical development of these abilities. We investigated this in a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech in 64 parent-child dyads: 32 typically developing children (20.27 months at start, six girls, 24 White) and 32…

Background: Many children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) demonstrate impairment in social skills. However, ADHD rarely occurs in isolation, with approximately one-third of children with ADHD having one additional disorder, and another third having two or three comorbidities. Few studies have considered the global and specific…

There is emerging evidence that young people have a good understanding of consent as a concept, but this does not align with real world practices. The perspectives of young people on the complexities of enacting consent are lacking, as are their views on the role of sex and relationships education. This study explored the topic of consent with 18…

Deception is a multi-faceted social behaviour that is pervasive in human communication. Due to differences in social communication and experiences, autistic and non-autistic adults may contrast in how they respond to situations that elicit deceptive decision-making. This study examined whether autistic and non-autistic adults differed in their…

Girls, more than boys, experience a decrease in the severity of autism symptoms during childhood. It is unclear, however, which specific autistic behaviors change more for girls than for boys. Trajectories of autism symptoms were evaluated using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-calibrated severity scores (ADOS-CSS). Change in the…

Introduction: The present study examined the between- and within-person associations among negative weight-related experiences, weight bias internalization, and body shame, embarrassment, and pride in adolescents. Methods: Participants were 93 Canadian students (M[subscript age] = 15.54, 59.10% girls, 40.86% white) who completed a 5-day daily…

Many individuals with autism experience challenges using language in social contexts (i.e., pragmatic language). Characterizing and understanding pragmatic variability is important to inform intervention strategies and the etiology of communication challenges in autism; however, current manual coding-based methods are often time and labor…