To cooperate with a partner, it is essential to communicate by sharing information through all available avenues, including hand gestures, gazes, head gestures and naturally, speech. In this paper, we compare the communicative and coordination skills of children with typical development to those of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) in…

The current study experimentally evaluated the effects of therapeutic horseback riding on the behavior of children with autism using a multiple baseline across participants design and a waitlist control group for comparison purposes. Participants were observed weekly in an after-school program during four center-based activities and during…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between parental emotion coaching and externalizing behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Children with ASD often exhibit externalizing behaviors, particularly emotionally driven externalizing behaviors, at a higher rate than their typically developing peers. An…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are at high risk for co-occurring psychiatric disorders. Previous research has suggested that restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRB) are associated with symptoms of co-occurring psychiatric disorders in individuals with ASD, but this relationship is not well understood. The current study…

Negative feedback was explored as a potential mechanism that may exacerbate perseverative behaviours in individuals with Asperger's syndrome (AS). The current study compared 50 individuals with AS and 50 typically developing (TD) individuals for their abilities to successfully complete the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) in the presence or…

Burnout has been considered important to understand the well-being of people who work with individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) and developmental disabilities (DD). To identify personal and workplace characteristics associated with burnout, this study aimed to utilize the Chinese version of the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory to provide a…

The purpose of the present investigation was to evaluate a rapid assessment procedure to identify effective instructional strategies to teach auditory-visual conditional discriminations to children diagnosed with autism. We replicated and extended previous rapid skills assessments (Lerman, Vorndran, Addison, & Kuhn, 2004) by evaluating the effects…

The advantage in responding to self vs. others' body and face-parts (the so called self-advantage) is considered to reflect the implicit access to the bodily self representation and has been studied in healthy and brain-damaged adults in previous studies. If the distinction of the self from others is a key aspect of social behaviour and is a…

The present study examined the effectiveness of Social Stories[TM], and Social Stories paired with a differential reinforcement procedure on disruptive behaviors of two elementary school children diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We implemented a…

Identifying evidence-based practices for individuals with disabilities requires specification of procedural implementation. Video-based modeling (VBM), consisting of both video self-modeling and video modeling with others as model (VMO), is one class of interventions that has frequently been explored in the literature. However, current information…

Frequency of suicide ideation and attempts in 791 children with autism (1-16 years), 35 nonautistic depressed children, and 186 typical children and risk factors in autism were determined. Percent of children with autism for whom suicide ideation or attempts was rated as sometimes to very often a problem by mothers (14%) was 28 times greater than…

Although autism is now recognized as being very common (Buie et al., 2010) and as developing due to not only genetic but also environmental factors, there is insufficient epidemiological evidence on the relationship between autism and allergy. In this study, therefore, we attempted to clarify the association of environmental factors with autism…

Several brain regions show structural and functional abnormalities in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), but the developmental trajectory of abnormalities in these structures and how they may relate to social and communicative impairments are still unclear. We assessed the effects of age on cortical thickness in individuals with…

Unusual fears have long been recognized as common in autism, but little research exists. In our sample of 1033 children with autism, unusual fears were reported by parents of 421 (41%) of the children, representing 92 different fears. Many additional children had common childhood fears (e.g., dogs, bugs, and the dark). More than half of children…

Second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs) induce frequent adverse effects in children and adolescents with each compound appearing to have a specific adverse effect profile. Aripiprazole and risperidone are FDA-approved medications for behavioral disturbances associated with autism and/or intellectual disabilities (ID) in children and adolescents.…