While autism spectrum disorder screening tools provide a useful resource for practitioners, the reality is they are underused. The justifications often provided include the time required for administration and the training involved. A brief tool with good psychometric properties that require minimal training is required. This study examined the…

Often included within 'high-risk sibling' studies, the Autism Observation Scale for Infants (AOSI) has only one independent replication study and no evaluation with community-ascertained cohorts. We administered the AOSI and established clinical measures with 103 infants (68% male) at 'high autism likelihood' on the Social Attention and…

Brewer, Young, and Barnett reported a comprehensive psychometric evaluation of a new adult theory of mind measure (A-ToM) with a sample of high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) adults. Although correlations with existing theory of mind (ToM) instruments (i.e., the Strange Stories; the Frith- Happé animations) were reported, relationships…

The validity, reliability and factor structure of the Autism Spectrum Disorder Behaviour Checklist-Revised (ASDBC-R) were measured in a sample of 140 boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged between 6 and 18 years. Internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) was satisfactory and the ASDBC-R significantly correlated with the Social Responsiveness…

Background: The Autism Detection in Early Childhood (ADEC) is a clinician-administered, Level 2 screening tool. A retrospective file audit was used to investigate its clinical effectiveness. Method: Toddlers referred to an Australian child development service between 2008 and 2010 (N = 53, M age = 32.2 months) were screened with the ADEC. Their…

Systematic reviews have traditionally focused on internal validity, while external validity often has been overlooked. In this study, we systematically reviewed determinants of external validity in the accumulated randomized controlled trials of social skills group interventions for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. We…

Previous research shows that high-functioning children with autism are slow to pass "litmus" false belief tests of ToM but how this may relate to other aspects of mindreading (e.g., discerning thoughts from facial expressions) is less clear, partly for methodological reasons. Thus the joint methodological and conceptual goals of this…

A 24-item short form of the 96-item Developmental Behaviour Checklist was developed to provide a brief measure of Total Behaviour Problem Score for research purposes. The short form Developmental Behaviour Checklist (DBC-P24) was chosen for low bias and high precision from among 100 randomly selected item sets. The DBC-P24 was developed from…

This critique of facilitated communication as an aid for individuals with autism reviews its use in Australia and discusses such issues as the high degree of physical intervention provided by the assistant and the unlikely language content exhibited. An editorial comment deplores the media hype promoting facilitated communication but admits its…