Autism spectrum disorder is a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. The symptoms invariably appear in early childhood and cause significant impairment in social, occupational, and other important…

Previous experimental work showed that young adults reporting loneliness performed less well on emotion recognition tasks (Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy [DANVA-2]) if they were framed as indicators of social aptitude, but not when the same tasks were framed as indexing academic aptitude. Such findings suggested that undergraduates…

In humans, effortful cognitive processing frequently takes place during social interaction, with eye contact being an important component. This study shows that the effect of eye contact on memory for nonsocial information is different in children with typical development than in children with autism, a disorder of social communication. Direct…

The efficacy of a peer-mediated, theatre-based intervention on social competence in participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was tested. Thirty 8-to-14 year-olds with ASD were randomly assigned to the treatment (n = 17) or a wait-list control (n = 13) group. Immediately after treatment, group effects were seen on social ability,…

This article presents a review of the literature on orofacial clefting in children. The authors review the etiology, prevalence, and variations of clefting as well as issues related to neuropsychological, social, academic, emotional, and behavioral functioning of children with clefts. Finally, the authors discuss the implications for school…

Facial affect processing is essential to social development and functioning and is particularly relevant to models of depression. Although cognitive and interpersonal theories have long described different pathways to depression, cognitive-interpersonal and evolutionary social risk models of depression focus on the interrelation of interpersonal…

This article aims to explore Executive Emotional System (EES) disruption as causal agent in frontal lobishness among abused children. The "Revised Senior South African Individual Scale" (SSAIS-R) was used to assess a sample population of seventy-five male and female subjects between the ages of 8 years 0 months and 16 years 11 months who were…

This study examined language and executive functions (EF) in high-functioning school-aged individuals with autism and individually matched controls. Relationships between executive, language, and social functioning were also examined. Participants with autism exhibited difficulty on measures of expressive grammar, figurative language, planning,…

This paper examines differences between students with and without learning disabilities (LD) in processing social information within the context of a social information processing model. It proposes that language problems may not be the sole cause for poor social skills in students with learning disabilities and suggests that social remediation…