The present qualitative study comprised interviews with nine young people with autism (aged 16-21 years) about their perceptions of autism. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, three underlying themes were illuminated, and all these formed the superordinate theme Making Comparisons: (a) Changes over time: "I'm really glad this…

Patients with autism spectrum disorders and intellectual disability can be clinically complex and often have limited access to psychiatric care. Because little is known about post-graduate clinical education in autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability, we surveyed training directors of child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship…

The "body inversion effect" refers to superior recognition of upright than inverted images of the human body and indicates typical configural processing. Previous research by Reed et al. using static images of the human body shows that people with autism fail to demonstrate this effect. Using a novel task in which adults, adolescents…

Social-cognitive deficits differentiate parents with the "broad autism phenotype" from non-broad autism phenotype parents more robustly than other neuropsychological features of autism, suggesting that this domain may be particularly informative for identifying genetic and brain processes associated with the phenotype. The current study…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is among other things characterized by specific impairments in emotion processing. It is not clear, however, to what extent the typical decline in affective functioning is related to the specific autistic traits. We employed "The Autism Spectrum-Quotient" (AQ) to quantify autistic traits in a group of 500…

Traits associated with autism and social anxiety were assessed in a UK student population (n = 1325) using the Autism-spectrum Quotient and the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. Clinically relevant levels of autistic traits were observed in 3.3% of the cohort; 10.1% of the cohort reported clinically relevant levels of social anxiety; 1.8% of the…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often display impairments in creativity, yet savant artists with ASD are reported to produce highly novel and original artistic outputs. To explore this paradox, we assessed nine savant artists with ASD, nine talented art students, nine non-artistically talented individuals with ASD, and nine…

People with autism spectrum condition (ASC) perform well on Raven's matrices, a test which loads highly on the general factor in intelligence. However, the mechanisms supporting enhanced performance on the test are poorly understood. Evidence is accumulating that milder variants of the ASC phenotype are present in typically developing individuals,…

As more young people are identified with autism spectrum diagnoses without co-occurring intellectual disability (i.e. high-functioning autism spectrum disorder; HFASD), it is imperative that we begin to study the needs of this population. We sought to gain a preliminary estimate of the scope of the problem and to examine psychiatric risks…

Cerebellar dysfunction and impaired cognitive flexibility are key features of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, despite the increasing interest in subclinical autism, no research has yet examined the relationship between these signs and autistic traits in the wider population. This study used the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) questionnaire…