Many community-academic partnerships are established to conduct meaningful research and practice. Yet, little is written about their sustainability and what does exist suggests that effective partnerships are hard to sustain. In this study, we sought insights into what might support successful, enduring community-academic partnerships focused on…

More Australian students who are neurodivergent are entering post-secondary education. Experiences of higher education varies for these students. We investigated the university experience of 33 neurodivergent undergraduates in higher education through individual semi-structured interviews. Participants were enrolled in Education or Health…

Children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show difficulties in recognizing emotions. Similarities and differences between these two clinical groups' emotion recognition (ER) have been little explored. This systematic review aims to summarize the results of comparative…

Set within the context of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, this article interrogates the extent to which the right to be heard is afforded equally to all children and young people. It shows that despite widespread global commitment to these conventions, the…

Music therapy has acquired over the years a gradual process of medicalization generated by the need to provide evidence-based results in the treatment and rehabilitation of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Otherwise, the goal of music as therapy should not be to propose music as a kind of remedy or cure, but to promote relationships between individuals,…

My dissertation consists of five chapters with three stand-alone studies. Chapter one is an introduction to social and leisure skills of adults with ASD, and I demonstrate my rationale and for the subsequent chapters. Chapter two is a systematic review of the literature on promoting leisure outcomes of adults with ASD. Chapter three is another…

Some children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) demonstrate unusual islets of abilities or "splinter skills" that represent relative strengths in their development. In this paper we present a clinical case of an 11-year-old Russian boy with ASD who spontaneously acquired the English language. While the child demonstrated language…

Suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB) and emergency department (ED) utilization are prevalent in autistic youth. The current study surveyed clinicians in a pediatric psychiatric ED to examine differences in attitudes on suicide-related care for autistic and non-autistic patient populations. While clinicians rated addressing STB in ASD as important…

Transitioning autistic youth from pediatric to adult healthcare requires coordination of multiple stakeholders, including youth, caregivers, and pediatric and adult care providers, whose interests at times overlap but often differ. To understand barriers and facilitators to inclusive transition experiences, we conducted thematic analysis of…

Insistence on Sameness has been pathologized as a subtype of restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities, in autism. We examined the meanings of Insistence on Sameness for autistic adults through the lens of critical autism studies and environmental psychology, exploring their foodways and experiences of food…

Actively involving the network during treatment, as recommended in Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) guidelines, can be facilitated with the Network in Action-Questionnaire (NiA-Q), which identifies the current and potential sources of social support. The aims of this study were to (1) examine the factor structure of the NiA-Q and (2) to explore the…

Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disability affecting individuals across their entire lifespan. Autistic individuals have differences from nonautistic people (sometimes called allistic or neurotypical people) in social skills, communication, and atypical interests and/or repetitive behaviors. Approximately 1 in 59 children are born…

Parental involvement in traditional autism therapy is key to the effective treatment of children with ASD. Little is known about parental involvement in robot-assisted autism therapy (RAAT)--novel therapeutic support for children with ASD. Our study investigates the effect of parental presence on multiple-session RAAT conducted with 16 children…

Studies have supported two different hypotheses of reduced eye gaze in people with ASD; gaze "avoidance" and gaze "indifference," while less is known about the role of anxiety. We tested these hypotheses using an eye-tracking paradigm that cued the eyes or mouth of emotional faces. Autistic children (n = 12, mean age 7 years)…

A survey asked autistic and non-autistic people about the driving difficulties they experience and their autistic traits. Principle components analysis was used to identify how reported difficulties clustered together in each group, and regression was used to determine which subscales of the Autism Spectrum Quotient predict these factors. For…