Patricia Howlin

TL;DR: Although outcome for adults with autism has improved over recent years, many remain highly dependent on others for support and more fine-grained research is needed into the childhood variables that are associated with good or poor outcome.

TL;DR: High-functioning people with autistic disorder have biological differences from controls when consciously and unconsciously processing facial emotions, and these differences are most likely to be neurodevelopmental in origin.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the efficacy of early interventions for social communication for the treatment of autism in children and found that dyadic social communication can reduce the severity of autism symptoms.

TL;DR: A large number of adults with autism who had shown early delays in language were compared with individuals who were reported to have had no such delays, either in their use of words or phrases, and poor performance on language tests challenges the assumption that early language development in Asperger syndrome is essentially normal.

TL;DR: Regression analysis indicated that although early language ability appeared to be related to outcome in the Autism group, there was little association between any measures of childhood functioning and prognosis in the Language group, and these findings have implications for the understanding of the nature of autism and other pervasive language disorders.