Autism has been associated with increased mortality risk among adult populations, but little is known about the mortality risk among children and young people (0-24 years). We used a 15-year nationwide birth cohort study using linked health and non-health administrative data to estimate the mortality risk among Autistic children and young people…

Superstitious behaviors persist across time, culture, and age. Although often considered irrational and even potentially harmful, superstitions have recently been shown to have positive effects on stress levels, confidence, and ultimately, performance. However, it remains unclear how people conceive of superstitious behaviors, specifically,…

Purpose: The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) is frequently used in research settings to measure characteristics associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A short version has been developed but not yet tested for certain properties of the full SRS, such as familiality. The purpose of this study was to determine if prior familiality…

Introduction: A number of recent studies have brought attention to the involvement of dietary salt and blood sodium levels in the etiopathogenesis of autism. In our study, by comparing the blood sodium levels of children with autism spectrum disease (ASD) and healthy children, we aimed to shed light on the etiopathogenesis of ASD. Method: We…

Limited research has examined the active ingredients and mechanisms of change of naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBIs). The present study used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design to develop a comprehensive Theory of Change of Project ImPACT, an empirically supported NDBI. We used qualitative data from interviews…

Spontaneous imaginary companion (SIC) creation in childhood is a typical imaginative play behaviour associated with advanced sociocognitive skills; however, the direction of causality has not been established. To investigate this experimentally, researchers must determine whether children can create, on request, qualitatively equivalent imaginary…

Given the developmental benefits associated with higher sense of purpose, past work has aimed to understand how experiences of adversity relate to sense of purpose. With a specific focus on experiences of adversity that may impact individuals from marginalized groups, past work has found that discrimination is related to lower sense of purpose in…

Talent identification and development systems (TIDS) adopt a deterministic perspective (i.e. athletes' future state/performances can be predicted by observations of their initial state/performance), which encourages early identification and specialisation in sport. In this framework, the main aim of sport systems is to enhance predictability and…

Causal inference involves determining whether a treatment (e.g., an education program) causes a change in outcomes (e.g., academic achievement). It is well-known that causal effects are more challenging to estimate than associations. Over the past 50 years, the potential outcomes framework has become one of the most widely used approaches for…

Background: There is growing interest in research understanding the individual-specific predictors of child callous-unemotional (CU) traits, particularly in early childhood. Objective: This study reviewed evidence from studies that investigated the relationship between early child temperament factors (between 0 and 3 years) and CU traits in…

Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We test whether causal reasoning plays a role, and find that from childhood, people can intuitively reason about how musical sounds were generated, inferring the events and agents that caused the sounds. In Experiment 1 (N = 120, pre-registered), 6-year-old children…

Machine learning (ML) methods for causal inference have gained popularity due to their flexibility to predict the outcome model and the propensity score. In this article, we provide a within-group approach for ML-based causal inference methods in order to robustly estimate average treatment effects in multilevel studies when there is cluster-level…

If cues from different sensory modalities share the same cause, their information can be integrated to improve perceptual precision. While it is well established that adults exploit sensory redundancy by integrating cues in a Bayes optimal fashion, whether children under 8 years of age combine sensory information in a similar fashion is still…

Beliefs about the controllability of positive or negative events in the environment can shape learning throughout the lifespan. Previous research has shown that adults' learning is modulated by beliefs about the causal structure of the environment such that they update their value estimates to a lesser extent when the outcomes can be attributed to…

Widespread availability of rich educational databases facilitates the use of conditioning strategies to estimate causal effects with nonexperimental data. With dozens, hundreds, or more potential predictors, variable selection can be useful for practical reasons related to communicating results and for statistical reasons related to improving the…