Showing papers in "Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders in 2009"

TL;DR: It was concluded that comprehensive assessments of anxiety in ASD populations should use multiple informants, multimodal assessment techniques, and standardized assessment methods that are appropriate for clinical use in ASD samples.

TL;DR: In this article, parents of children in the autism spectrum wrote an open-ended answer via an online questionnaire to the question, “How has your child in the spectrum affected your life and your family's life?” (N = ǫ493).

TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify risk factors for the occurrence of challenging behavior along with the specific topographies of challenging behaviour shown by a sample of children with autism spectrum disorder in Ireland.

TL;DR: In this article, a systematic analysis of studies that focused on the use of peer-mediated interventions (PMI) in the treatment of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is presented.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluate the relationship of treatment hours and participant age with the rate of learning within an early intensive behavioral intervention program and find that for children between 2 and 7 years of age, there was a significant increase in new skill acquisition with increased treatment hours.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined factors impacting caregiver burden following diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and found that most families reported high levels of burden following their child's diagnosis, including severity of autistic symptoms, additional life demands, social support, appraisal, and coping strategies.

TL;DR: The strongest predictors of sleep disturbance were parent ratings of autism severity, hyperactivity, mood variability, and aggression, and the most frequent sleep problems were difficulty falling asleep and restlessness during sleep.

TL;DR: In this paper, a new measure, the Baby and Infant Screen for Children with aUtIsm Traits (BISCUIT), was proposed to identify young children with autism and Pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) at the earliest possible ages.

TL;DR: Group status, younger chronological age, presence of sensory processing issues, and difficulties with behavior regulation predicted the presence of repetitive behaviors in the HFA group, suggesting that executive dysfunction is not the shared neurocognitive mechanism that accounts for the relationship between restricted, repetitive behaviors.

TL;DR: The utility of the Baby and Infant Screen for Children with aUtIsm Traits for assisting in autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) diagnoses in a sample of 1007 “at risk” children ages 17–37 months is reported on.

TL;DR: Video-based intervention is a broad term used here to be inclusive of procedures that involve presenting video footage as the independent variable for intervention, such as video modeling, video prompting, video self-modeling, computer-based video instruction and video priming as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: A review and status report on evidence-based methods that are available for training parents of children with ASD as therapists is presented in this paper, where current trends and future directions are discussed.

TL;DR: Early and intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) has been demonstrated to be a highly effective treatment for early childhood autism as discussed by the authors, however, the extent of this procedural variability is unknown.

TL;DR: In this paper, a web-based questionnaire regarding the development of children with ASD was distributed nationally and internationally through more than 200 autism-support organizations; results were analyzed from 479 parents who reported on their children with autism, Asperger's syndrome, or PDD-NOS (M age = 8.3 years, 80.2% male).

TL;DR: A review of studies involving pragmatic language comprehension and inference abilities in individuals with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism can be found in this paper, where the most commonly suggested explanations for pragmatic inference deficits were theory of mind and central coherence.

TL;DR: In this paper, seven autistic children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) received a neurofeedback treatment that aimed to improve their level of executive control, which was found to have improved greatly relative to pre-treatment assessment on a range of executive function tasks.

TL;DR: A critical review of the current status of evidence-based clinical practices for this highly important set of challenging behaviors of ASD children is provided.

TL;DR: The field of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) is expanding at an exponential rate as discussed by the authors and new topics for study are forming and journals are emerging rapidly to handle the ever-increasing volume of publications.

TL;DR: Patterns of eye movements were studied in a group of 10 preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and in two reference groups with typically developing children, showing that the children with ASD tracked moving objects with smooth pursuit and predicted the reappearance of temporarily occluded moving object in the same way as the TD children.

TL;DR: A review of the current literature addressing toilet training individuals with autism and other developmental disabilities can be found in this paper, where the authors present a set of programs typical to toilet training the developmental disability population, most of which are modeled after the original Foxx and Azrin [Azrin, N. H., & Foxx, R. M. [1971] rapid toilet training methods.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors assessed the effectiveness of a Teaching Interaction procedure for four social skills across three participants diagnosed with autism, i.e., social-communication, play, emotion skills, and choice/selection skills.

TL;DR: In this article, a significant correlation was found between intensity of supervision and improvement scores in IQ for children with autism who received early and intensive behavioral intervention, and the correlation was reliably associated with the amount of IQ change between intake and follow-up.

TL;DR: In this article, the effects of a teacher implemented playground intervention consisting of activity schedules and task correspondence training on the challenging behaviors and play of three school age children with moderate to severe autism were examined.

TL;DR: The ASD-CC appears to be a valid measure of comorbid psychopathology in the ASD population, and construct validity of the measure is evaluated by correlating the empirically derived factors with subscales of the Behavioral Assessment System for Children, Version 2 (BASC-2).

TL;DR: In this article, the long-term results of neurofeedback treatment in the same group of children with ASD after 12 months were reported, which indicated maintenance of improvement of executive functions and social behavior after twelve months in comparison with the immediate outcomes.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify the factor structure of the BISCUIT-Part 3 through exploratory factor analysis and determine the ability of these factors to predict group membership.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the associations of age, social engagement and physical activity in children with ASD and found that children with frequent social engagement with adults had higher levels of physical activity.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluated the food selectivity of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), atypical and typical development with respect to their current behavior regarding food.

TL;DR: The ASD-DC, which can be administered in 10–15 min proved to be a relatively accurate and valid diagnostic instrument when compared to the diagnostic methods described above.

TL;DR: This preliminary investigation sought to refine a behavioral profile that predicted treatment response of children with autism to a specific behavioral intervention, Pivotal Response Training by obtaining six participants matching the original nonresponder profile on all but one of the profile behaviors.