Browsing by Subject "Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)"
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Item Empathy emerges : how social impairment and familiarity impact the development of empathy during the second year of life(2015-08) Dowd, Alexandra Catherine; Neal, A. Rebecca; Woolley, JacquelineThe ability to understand and share another’s feelings emerges within the first year of life in typically developing children. Impaired empathic responses, occurring early in development, such as those observed in young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), can negatively impact subsequent social development. Understanding what individual and situational contexts contribute to successful empathic responses is crucial to understanding how these impairments manifest. The current study explores potential relations between early empathic responses to the distress of a social partner and: 1) early markers of social impairment, and 2) familiarity with person in distress. Infant siblings of children with (high-risk) and without (low-risk) ASD were assessed at 12 (n=29) and 15 (n=35) months, using the Autism Observation Schedule for Infants (AOSI) as a measure of social impairment. Infants' responses to both their mother and the experimenter feigning distress were also evaluated at 12 and 15 months. Individual differences in social impairment impacted infants' attention and affective responses at 15 months but not 12 months. While empathic responses increased for those with little to no social impairment, those with high social impairment were not making developmental gains over time. Infants attended more to the unfamiliar person (experimenter) in distress across 12 and 15 months. While infants displayed more affect for the familiar person in distress at 12 months, they responded similarly to both people at 15 months, suggesting that affective responses are generalizing to unfamiliar people over time. Implications of this research, such as early interventions, as well as limitations and future directions are discussed.Item An examination of collaborative strategic reading-high school (CSR-HS) intervention in students with ASD(2014-08) El Zein, Farah; Vaughn, Sharon, 1952-; O'Reilly, Mark F.This study investigates the effects of implementing Collaborative Strategic Reading–High School (CSR–HS) on reading comprehension and challenging behavior outcomes for three high school students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Using a combined single subject research design consisting of a delayed, concurrent multiple-baseline and an alternating treatments with reversal, three high school students with ASD were paired with neurotypical reading partners to learn and use reading strategies with informational text two to three times per week. The alternating treatment conditions were CSR-HS with choice of text (i.e., CSR-HS-C) and CSR-HS without the opportunity to choose the reading text (i.e., CSR-HS-NC). Daily comprehension checks were collected and visually inspected along with data on occurrences of various challenging behaviors exhibited by each participant during intervention. Fidelity of implementation was also measured. Increased reading comprehension scores and decreased incidences of challenges behaviors were detected for the three participants upon implementation of intervention conditions. As for the influence of the choice component on the measured outcomes, no clear differentiation between conditions was observed in terms of reading comprehension gains and reduction in challenging behavior across the three participants, suggesting that the addition of choice did not show an added value to CSR-HS intervention.