Assessing parenting stress in parents of children with autism has crucial clinical implications because increased parental stress is associated with psychological disorders and personal distress, which can result in worse child-parent relationships. We examined the psychometric properties of a new index for assessing parenting stressors--the…

The understanding of emotions based on counterfactual reasoning was studied in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders ("n" = 71) and in typically developing children ("n" = 71), aged 6-12 years. Children were presented with eight stories about two protagonists who experienced the same positive or negative…

This study reports on a new false belief measure in a sample of 124 children and adolescents with or without high functioning autism (HFASD). In the classic paradigm, a participant predicts in which of two discrete locations a deceived protagonist will look for an object. In the current Sandbox task, the object is buried and reburied in a sandbox,…

Children with Asperger syndrome (AS) have IQ within the normal range but specific impairments in theory of mind, social interaction and communication skills. The majority receive education in mainstream schools and research suggests they are bullied more than typically developing peers. The current study aimed to evaluate factors that predict…

We compared young people with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) with age, sex and IQ matched controls on emotion recognition of faces and pictorial context. Each participant completed two tests of emotion recognition. The first used Ekman series faces. The second used facial expressions in visual context. A control task involved…

This study compares DSM-IV symptoms in children (ages 6 to 12 years) with pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), clinic controls, and community-based samples. Parents/teachers completed the Child Symptom Inventory-4 for four samples: PDD (N= 284/284) and non-PDD psychiatric clinic referrals (N= 189/181) and pupils in regular (N= 385/404) and…