Objectives: Two studies were conducted to better understand how children with intellectual disabilities (ID) empathize with the feelings of others during social interactions. The first study tested hypotheses of developmental delay or difference regarding empathy in 79 children with ID by comparing them with typically developing (TD) children,…

Purpose: The present study investigates healthcare students' affective, behavioral, and cognitive attitudes toward hypothetical peers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and the effect of the ASD label on their attitudes. Methods: The MAS scale for ASD persons in the postsecondary education (Matthews et al., 2015) was translated and adapted in…

Elevated laughing and smiling is a key characteristic of the Angelman syndrome behavioral phenotype, with cross-sectional studies reporting changes with environment and age. This study compares levels of laughing and smiling in 12 participants across three experimental conditions [full social interaction (with eye contact), social interaction with…

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…

Children with autism often exhibit low levels of social engagement, decreased levels of eye contact, and low social affect. However, both the literature and our direct clinical observations suggest that some components of intervention procedures may result in improvement in child-initiated social areas. Using an ABAB research design with three…

Does autism involve a deficit in intersubjective engagement with other persons? We studied nonverbal communication in children and adolescents with and without autism (n = 12 per group), group-matched for chronological age and verbal mental age, during 3 min of a videotaped interview. In keeping with previous studies, there were only subtle but…

In an examination of the association of shared positive affect during 2 communicative contexts, it was found that 18 normal children displayed positive affect toward an adult during joint attention situations, while 18 autistic children did not. Eighteen mentally retarded children displayed high levels of positive affect during requesting as well…

Verbal marking of affect by older children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and high functioning autism (HFA) during spontaneous interactions is described. Discourse analysis of AS and HFA and typically developing children included frequency of affective utterances, affective initiations, affective labels and affective explanations, attribution of…

Evaluation of 26 children (ages 24-55 months) with pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) while interacting with either the mother, a familiar female teacher, and an unfamiliar male doctor. PDD subjects were most severely impaired during the mother episode. During the teacher episode, PDD subjects were twice as variable in interpersonal response…