The Adult Autism Quotient (AQ), the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and the Relative's Questionnaire (RQ) were used as part of the Adult Asperger's Assessment (AAA) by a diagnostic service for adults without an intellectual disability with suspected autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This service is part of the National Health Service (NHS) in England. Little…

Valid and reliable tools to measure mental health are a key requirement to developing a robust evidence base on mental health difficulties and autism. There are several reasons why mental health measures developed for the neurotypical population may not be valid and reliable when used with autistic adults. Using data collected from a national…

Limited research has examined methods to investigate the views, preferences and experiences of young people with autism and complex needs. The aim of this study, based at a specialist residential school in England, was to develop and pilot an innovative method for this purpose--a 'Talking Wall'--that was trialled over a 6-month period. Thematic…

Previous research suggests that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) might be associated with impairments on implicit but not explicit mentalizing tasks. However, such comparisons are made difficult by the heterogeneity of stimuli and the techniques used to measure mentalizing capabilities. We tested the abilities of 34 individuals (17 with ASD) to…

Establishing whether implicit responses to emotional cues are intact in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is fundamental to ascertaining why their emotional understanding is compromised. We used a temporal bisection task to assess for responsiveness to face and wildlife images that varied in emotional salience. There were no significant differences…

Online surveys were used to sample the views of judges, barristers and solicitors (n = 33) about their engagement with autistic individuals in criminal courts in England and Wales. Despite an understanding of some of the difficulties experienced by individuals with autism, and the adjustments suitable for supporting them, legal professionals…

We re-evaluate conclusions about disfluency production in high-functioning forms of autism spectrum disorder (HFA). Previous studies examined individuals with HFA to address a theoretical question regarding speaker- and listener-oriented disfluencies. Individuals with HFA tend to be self-centric and have poor pragmatic language skills, and should…

The current study explored attentional processing of social and non-social stimuli in ASD within the context of a driving hazard perception task. Participants watched videos of road scenes and detected hazards while their eye movements were recorded. Although individuals with ASD demonstrated relatively good detection of driving hazards, they were…

This study explored whether adults and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate difficulties making metacognitive judgments, specifically judgments of learning. Across two experiments, the study examined whether individuals with ASD could accurately judge whether they had learnt a piece of information (in this case word pairs).…