Widening participation in theatre through ‘relaxed performances’

This paper what 'relaxed performances' are and how a growing number of theatres are beginning to offer them to families living with autism and other disabilities opportunities to attend without fear of alienation or rejection by other audience members. Using one small theatre as a case study, the chapter illustrates the sort of adaptations that are made to the performance and front of house arrangements and reports on the positive effects one particular relaxed performance had on some of those who attended.

A pooled genome-wide association study of Asperger Syndrome

Asperger Syndrome (AS) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by impairments in social interaction and communication, alongside the presence of unusually repetitive, restricted interests and stereotyped behaviour. Individuals with AS have no delay in cognitive and language development. It is a subset of Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC), which are highly heritable and has a population prevalence of approximately 1%. Few studies have investigated the genetic basis of AS. To address this gap in the literature, we performed a genome-wide pooled DNA association study to identify candidate loci in 612 individuals (294 cases and 318 controls) of Caucasian ancestry, using the Affymetrix GeneChip Human Mapping version 6.0 array. We identified 11 SNPs that had a p-value below 1x10-5. These SNPs were independently genotyped in the same sample. Three of the SNPs (rs1268055, rs7785891 and rs2782448) were nominally significant, though none remained significant after Bonferroni correction. Two of our top three SNPs (rs7785891 and rs2782448) lie in loci previously implicated in ASC. However, investigation of the three SNPs in the ASC genome-wide association dataset from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium indicated that these three SNPs were not significantly associated with ASC. The effect sizes of the variants were modest, indicating that our study was not sufficiently powered to identify causal variants with precision.

Autistic traits moderate the impact of reward learning on social behaviour

A deficit in empathy has been suggested to underlie social behavioural atypicalities in autism. A parallel theoretical account proposes that reduced social motivation (i.e., low responsivity to social rewards) can account for the said atypicalities. Recent evidence suggests that autistic traits modulate the link between reward and proxy metrics related to empathy. Using an evaluative conditioning paradigm to associate high and low rewards with faces, a previous study has shown that individuals high in autistic traits show reduced spontaneous facial mimicry of faces associated with high vs. low reward. This observation raises the possibility that autistic traits modulate the magnitude of evaluative conditioning. To test this, we investigated (a) if autistic traits could modulate the ability to implicitly associate a reward value to a social stimulus (reward learning/conditioning, using the Implicit Association Task, IAT); (b) if the learned association could modulate participants’ prosocial behaviour (i.e., social reciprocity, measured using the cyberball task); (c) if the strength of this modulation was influenced by autistic traits. In 43 neurotypical participants, we found that autistic traits moderated the relationship of social reward learning on prosocial behaviour but not reward learning itself. This evidence suggests that while autistic traits do not directly influence social reward learning, they modulate the relationship of social rewards with prosocial behaviour

Spontaneous facial mimicry is modulated by joint attention and autistic traits

Joint attention (JA) and spontaneous facial mimicry (SFM) are fundamental processes in social interactions, and they are closely related to empathic abilities. When tested independently, both of these processes have been usually observed to be atypical in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). However, it is not known how these processes interact with each other in relation to autistic traits. This study addresses this question by testing the impact of JA on SFM of happy faces using a truly interactive paradigm. Sixty-two neurotypical participants engaged in gaze-based social interaction with an anthropomorphic, gaze-contingent virtual agent. The agent either established JA by initiating eye contact or looked away, before looking at an object and expressing happiness or disgust. Eye tracking was used to make the agent's gaze behavior and facial actions contingent to the participants' gaze. SFM of happy expressions was measured by Electromyography (EMG) recording over the Zygomaticus Major muscle. Results showed that JA augments SFM in individuals with low compared with high autistic traits. These findings are in line with reports of reduced impact of JA on action imitation in individuals with ASC. Moreover, they suggest that investigating atypical interactions between empathic processes, instead of testing these processes individually, might be crucial to understanding the nature of social deficits in autism

The experience of the hidden curriculum for autistic girls at mainstream primary schools

This article presents the findings of ethnographic case studies of three girls on the autistic spectrum attending mainstream primary schools and illustrates the difficulties they experience and the ways in which these are often unrecognised. The observations of the girls and subsequent individual interviews with their mothers, class teachers, SENCO’s and ultimately themselves, reveal the personal adjustments the girls make in response to the hidden curriculum and the ways in which these go unnoticed, effectively masking their need for support, and contributing to their underachievement in school. The research also identifies a misunderstanding of autism in girls by some teachers that contributes to a lack of support for their needs, despite their diagnosis. Teachers need to understand how autistic girls present, and how they learn, if they are to recognise the need to illuminate the hidden curriculum. The implications of these findings are that without this awareness autistic girls in mainstream settings are also at risk of limited access to the known curriculum and of social isolation.

Multi-sensory treatment for children with developmental motor speech disorders

What this paper adds? What is already known on the subject? Multi-sensory treatment approaches have been shown to impact outcome measures positively, such as accuracy of speech movement patterns and speech intelligibility in adults with motor speech disorders, as well as in children with apraxia of speech, autism and cerebral palsy. However, there has been no empirical study using multi-sensory treatment for children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) who demonstrate motor control issues in the jaw and orofacial structures (e.g. jaw sliding, jaw over extension, inadequate lip rounding/retraction and decreased integration of speech movements). What this paper adds? Findings from this study indicate that, for speech production disorders where both the planning and production of spatiotemporal parameters of movement sequences for speech are disrupted, multi-sensory treatment programmes that integrate auditory, visual and tactile–kinesthetic information improve auditory and visual accuracy of speech production. The training (practised in treatment) and test words (not practised in treatment) both demonstrated positive change in most participants, indicating generalization of target features to untrained words. It is inferred that treatment that focuses on integrating multi-sensory information and normalizing parameters of speech movements is an effective method for treating children with SSDs who demonstrate speech motor control issues.

Attention bias to emotional faces varies by IQ and anxiety in Williams syndrome

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) often experience significant anxiety. A promising approach to anxiety intervention has emerged from cognitive studies of attention bias to threat. To investigate the utility of this intervention in WS, this study examined attention bias to happy and angry faces in individuals with WS (N=46). Results showed a significant difference in attention bias patterns as a function of IQ and anxiety. Individuals with higher IQ or higher anxiety showed a significant bias toward angry, but not happy faces, whereas individuals with lower IQ or lower anxiety showed the opposite pattern. These results suggest that attention bias interventions to modify a threat bias may be most effectively targeted to anxious individuals with WS with relatively high IQ.