ERIC Number: EJ1019241
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Dec
Pages: 8
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1088-3576
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Available Date: N/A
Social Interest in High-Functioning Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Fletcher-Watson, Sue; Leekam, Susan R.; Findlay, John M.
Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, v28 n4 p222-229 Dec 2013
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are principally characterized by impairments in social functioning. Experimental investigation often is conducted using methods measuring social attention, social cognition, and social communication. In this study, we instead measured interest in social information, making a distinction between basic-level person-centered social information such as physical attributes of people ("human" information) and high-level social information such as hypotheses about mental states, emotion, and relationships ("social" information). Based on content analysis of verbal descriptions of color images, 31 young adults (4 women), aged 17 to 25 years with ASD, and 35 typically developing young adults (8 women), aged 17 to 31 years, devoted similar proportions of their descriptions to human and social topics. Results are interpreted in the context of current calls for more ecologically valid methodology and in relation to other assessments of social processing in ASD.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Pervasive Developmental Disorders, Autism, Interpersonal Competence, Interpersonal Communication, Content Analysis, Comparative Analysis, Young Adults, Predictor Variables, Photography, Interrater Reliability, Correlation, Social Cognition
SAGE Publications and Hammill Institute on Disabilities. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://sagepub.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom (England)
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