How Teaching Perspective Taking to Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders Affects Social Skills: Findings from Research and Suggestions for Practitioners

Clair M. Teaching Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Desire-Based Emotion Prediction and Cause

This study aimed to expand current research in one area of perspective taking related to teaching children with autism spectrum disorder to predict others' emotions. The current study evaluated a behavioral teaching procedure on predicting and inferring the cause of emotions based on another's desires. The procedure included a training package including multiple-exemplar training, rules, modeling, prompting, and reinforcement across scenarios in which children with autism were asked to predict how others may feel given a met or unmet desire or nondesire. Three children with autism, who did not already demonstrate this skill at baseline, were included in the study and learned a repertoire of emotion prediction and cause that generalized to untrained novel scenarios. Generalization to situations in which it was necessary to apply information about another's desires during play activities was not observed until direct in-vivo training was implemented. Future directions and implications of this research are discussed.

Different mediators of applied theory-of-mind competence in children with autism spectrum disorder

BACKGROUND

Children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) with mild and moderate symptom levels have significant differences in applied theory of mind (ToM) competence. However, their mediators of applied ToM competence have not been documented.

AIMS

This study aimed to identify the mediators of applied ToM competence in these two clinically distinct groups.

METHODS

A total of 163 children with ASD aged 3-12 years old (88 and 75 children respectively in the mild and moderate groups) and their caregivers participated in this study. Data of children's verbal comprehension, explicit ToM knowledge and applied ToM competence were collected and then analyzed using mediation analysis.

RESULTS

The results of mediation analysis showed that verbal comprehension (95% confidence interval [CI] of indirect effect: 0.02 - 0.19) and explicit ToM knowledge (95% CI of indirect effect: 0.01 - 0.07) were the mediators of applied ToM competence in children with mild and those with moderate symptoms, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Our findings demonstrate that the mediators of applied ToM competence differ by symptom level in children with ASD. Applied ToM competence and the mediators should be assessed for designing tailored and effective intervention plans for these children according to their symptom level.

Empathy influences how listeners interpret intonation and meaning when words are ambiguous

This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambiguating lexical information became available, by inferring either a contrast meaning or a confirmatory meaning from the intonation contour alone. Our results show that individual empathy skills determine how listeners deal with the meaning alternatives of an ambiguous referent, and the way they use intonational meaning to disambiguate the referent. Listeners with better pragmatic skills (higher empathy) were sensitive to intonation cues when forming sound-meaning associations during the unfolding of an ambiguous referent, and showed higher sensitivity to all the alternative interpretations of that ambiguous referent. Less pragmatically skilled listeners showed weaker processing of intonational meaning because they needed subsequent disambiguating material to select a referent and showed less sensitivity to the set of alternative interpretations. Overall, our results call for taking into account individual pragmatic differences in the study of intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in general.

Cerebellar Dysfunction in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Deriving Mechanistic Insights from an Internal Model Framework

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are highly prevalent neurodevelopmental disorders; however, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying disordered behavior in ASD remain poorly understood. Notably, individuals with ASD have demonstrated difficulties generating implicitly derived behavioral predictions and adaptations. Although many brain regions are involved in these processes, the cerebellum contributes an outsized role to these behavioral functions. Consistent with this prominent role, cerebellar dysfunction has been increasingly implicated in ASD. In this review, we will utilize the foundational, theoretical contributions of the late neuroscientist Masao Ito to establish an internal model framework for the cerebellar contribution to ASD-relevant behavioral predictions and adaptations. Additionally, we will also explore and then apply his key experimental contributions towards an improved, mechanistic understanding of the contribution of cerebellar dysfunction to ASD.

Can Behavior Analysis Help Us Understand and Reduce Racism? A review of the Current Literature

Despite ongoing efforts to eradicate racism, it persists globally, negatively affecting education, mental health, community relations, and economic development. Every behavior analyst can, and should, contribute to the reduction of racism in some way. Unfortunately, little behavior-analytic research exists to guide us. This article proposes ways that members of our scientific community can learn about racism from a behavioral perspective, extend experimental analyses of prejudice, and intervene to reduce racism in varied settings. It describes both traditional behavior-analytic and functional-contextualist accounts of racism and summarizes the small amount of related empirical and applied research. The review suggests that combining traditional behavior-analytic methods with acceptance and commitment training techniques may attenuate racism more effectively. The article ends with a call to collaborate around this globally important issue-and to do more to reduce racism.

A Matter of Perspective: An Exploratory Study of a Theory of Mind Autism Intervention for Adolescents

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the capacity to make attributions of mental states such as thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of others. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are often characterized by delayed or impaired Theory of Mind development and poor social skills. A positive correlation between Theory of Mind skills and social skills exists, but effective interventions that generalize these skills have proven to be a challenge in the field. Furthermore, few effective interventions exist to increase Theory of Mind skills in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. The Teaching Theory of Mind curriculum is a 12-week intervention aimed at increasing social understanding in children and adolescents with deficits in Theory of Mind. To date, there have not been any empirical studies to test the efficacy of the curriculum. The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficacy of the Teaching Theory of Mind curriculum on adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and explore the impact of the intervention when addressing various domains of social understanding. Results, though tentative, indicated that parents saw improved social understanding following intervention, though direct measures of Theory of Mind with adolescent participants did not change significantly.

Teaching a perspective-taking component skill to children with autism in the natural environment

We evaluated procedures for teaching three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder the perspective-taking component skill of tacting what others are sensing across all five senses: see, taste, feel, hear, and smell. Using a multiple baseline across participants design, we evaluated a training package consisting of multiple exemplar training, reinforcement, and error correction. The treatment package was implemented in the natural environment and was effective for teaching participants to tact what others sensed. Generalization across untrained stimuli and people was observed from baseline to posttraining for all participants. We discuss how this component skill may be related to teaching further skills related to perspective taking such as tacting what others know, predicting future behavior based upon one's beliefs, and creating false beliefs in others for the purpose of adaptive deceptive behaviors such as keeping secrets, surprises, and bluffing during games.