Circumscribed interests are a symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that may be related to exaggerated affective neural responses. However, the use of generic ASD-interest image stimuli has left an open question as to whether affective responses towards individual interests are greater in ASD compared to typically developing (TD) controls. We…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) shows deficits in self-other distinction during theory of mind (ToM). Here we investigated whether ASD patients also show difficulties in self-other distinction during empathy and if potential deficits are linked to dysfunctional resting-state connectivity patterns. In a first study, ASD patients and controls…

Children with autism exhibit deficits in their quantity and quality of joint attention. Early autism intervention studies rarely document improvement in joint attention quality. The purpose of this study was to determine whether there was a change in joint attention quality for preschoolers with autism who were randomized to a joint attention…

While most studies of emotion recognition in Asperger's Syndrome (AS) have focused solely on the verbal decoding of affective states, the current research employed the novel technique of using both nonverbal matching and verbal labeling tasks to examine the decoding of emotional body postures and facial expressions. AS participants performed…

A deficit in empathy has consistently been cited as a central characteristic of Asperger syndrome (AS), but previous research on adults has predominantly focused on cognitive empathy, effectively ignoring the role of affective empathy. We administered the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a multi-dimensional measure of empathy, and the Strange…