Mental distress is highly prevalent in university students, and autistic traits can hinder academic education. The substantial lifestyle changes experienced by new university students can induce mood and anxiety dysfunctions and subsequent suicide-related behaviors. The aims of this study were to evaluate the detectability of suicidal ideation…

Adults with autism and subclinical autistic traits report greater internalizing problems than their peers, but the psychological processes underlying these associations are not well understood. The current study used structural equation modeling to examine whether social experiences (social connectedness and loneliness) mediate the link between…

Co-occurring problems with mood and anxiety among adolescents and adults on the autism spectrum are highly prevalent and contribute to poor outcomes and diminished quality of life. The current study's principal aim was to evaluate variation in the presentation of depression symptomatology among adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder,…

Although children with a greater number of autistic traits are likely to have other mental health problems, research on the association between earlier autistic traits in preschool children and later emotional/behavioral outcomes is scarce. Using data from 189 Japanese community-based children, this study examined whether autistic traits at age 5…

Perceived loneliness and social competence were assessed for 127 children with ASD without comorbid ID, 4-7 years old, through child self-report. Using an abbreviated version of the "Loneliness and Social Dissatisfaction Questionnaire" (LSDQ; Cassidy and Asher in "Child Dev" 63:250-365, 1992), the majority of children reported…

Parents play a critical role in the development of children's emotional competence; however, little research examines parents' emotion socialisation practices among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this study, we compared the emotion socialisation practices of parents of children with ASD and to those of parents of children that…

Given the heterogeneity of autism spectrum disorder, an important limitation of much autism spectrum disorder research is that outcome measures are statistically modeled as separate dependent variables. Often, their multivariate structure is either ignored or treated as a nuisance. This study aims to lift this limitation by applying network…

The past decade has seen an increase in the number of students with autism attending mainstream educational provision. Improving outcomes for this group is a complex issue given the deficit of evidence-based practice. A new peer mentoring programme developed for students with autism in mainstream secondary schools was evaluated using a combination…

Bowler et al. ("Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders" 44(9):2355-2362. doi:10.1007/s10803-014-2105-y, 2014) have suggested that a specific memory impairment in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) arises from hippocampal failure to consolidate multiple related pieces of information. Twenty-four adults diagnosed with ASD and matched…

Problem-solving skills training is an intervention designed to teach coping skills that has shown to decrease negative affectivity (depressive symptoms, negative mood, and post-traumatic stress symptoms) in mothers of children with cancer. The objective of this study was to see whether mothers of children recently diagnosed with autism spectrum…

This study (a) examined the role of anger rumination as a mediator of the relation between social anxiety and the experience of anger, hostility, and aggression, in the general population, and (b) evaluated the degree to which the presence of autism spectrum disorder characteristics moderates the indirect influence of anger rumination. We then…

Making decisions to undergo Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) genetic testing can be challenging. It is important to understand how the perceptions of affected individuals might influence testing decision-making. Although evidence has shown that psychological factors are important in predicting testing decisions, affect-type variables have been…

The purpose of this study was to examine college students' perceptions of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and identify contributing factors that influence perceptions and reactions to students with ASD. Participants included 1,185 college students who responded to a survey in class or online. Trends in responses suggested that…

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between explicit and implicit forms of Theory of Mind reasoning and to test the influence of experience on implicit Theory of Mind reasoning in individuals with autism spectrum disorders and in neurotypical adults. Results from two standard explicit Theory of Mind tasks are mixed: Individuals with…

This study utilized a daily diaries method to explore the global factors that impact daily general affect and daily parenting interactions of mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder. Eighty-three mothers of a child with autism spectrum disorder between the ages of 3 and 13 years completed global assessments of maternal depressive…