Appreciating autistic neurodiversity is important when supporting autistic people who experience distress. Specifically, use of a profiling model can reveal less visible autistic differences, including strengths and abilities. Binary logistic regressions showed that the likelihood of extreme distress responses could be interpreted based on…

Previous research into autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has shown people with autism to be impaired at visual perspective taking. However it is still unclear to what extent the spatial mechanisms underlying this ability contribute to these difficulties. In the current experiment we examine spatial transformations in adults with ASD and typical…

The executive dysfunction theory attempts to explain not only the repetitive behaviours but also the socio-communicative difficulties in autism. While it is clear that some individuals with autism perform poorly on certain executive function tasks, it remains unclear what underlies these impairments. The most consistent and striking difficulties…

Qualitative differences in social interaction style exist "within" the autism spectrum. In this study we examined whether these differences are associated with (1) the severity of autistic symptoms and comorbid disruptive behavior problems, (2) the child's psycho-social health, and (3) executive functioning and perspective taking skills. The…

Mentalizing refers to making inferences about other people's mental states, whereas visuospatial perspective taking refers to inferring other people's viewpoints. Both abilities seem vital for social functioning; yet, their exact relationship is unclear. We directly compared mentalizing and visuospatial perspective taking in nineteen adults with…

Individuals with either high-functioning autism (N=17) or Asperger Syndrome (N=17) were tested with Happe's Strange Stories Test, which assesses the ability to interpret a nonliteral statement. Compared to normal controls, both groups had greater difficulty providing contextually appropriate mental state answers, with the autistic group having the…

This study compared children (n=68) with either autism or general delay on false belief tasks and tasks to test for an understanding of interpretive diversity. Findings partially support the view that tasks of understanding interpretive diversity are more difficult than false belief tasks. Between-group differences in the consistency and quality…

Comparison of autistic with nonautistic mentally retarded youth on three role-taking tasks and three measures of social competence found the autistic group deficient on each of the social competence measures and one of the role-taking measures. (Author/DB)

This study examined the understanding of others' intentions in 21/2- to 5-year-old children with autism and a control group of children with other developmental delays. No significant between-group differences were found, although within-group patterns suggested that children with autism may have a slightly less complex understanding of others'…

Testing with a battery of naturalistic stories found that the 24 subjects with autism were impaired (compared to normal and mentally disabled controls) at providing context-appropriate mental state explanations for the story characters' nonliteral utterances. Even those autistic subjects who performed well on standard Theory of Mind tasks showed…

This study examined the effectiveness of a social skills training program for five male adolescents with autism but normal IQ. In addition to teaching interactional and conversational skills, the program provided explicit instruction in social-cognitive principles of inferring the mental states of others. Significant changes in beliefs were found,…