Aim: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are described as a continuum of severity gradient of autistic symptoms diffusing through particular ASD diagnoses, however the biological correlates among individuals with the different ASD diagnoses slightly or considerably differ. Oxytocin (OT) has been implicated to play an important role in autism etiology. Lower OT levels have been previously found in c...

OBJECTIVE To investigate children selected from a community sample for showing extreme autistic-like traits and to assess the degree to which these individual traits--social impairments (SIs), communication impairments (CIs), and restricted repetitive behaviors and interests (RRBIs)--are caused by genes and environments, whether all of them are caused by the same genes and environments, and how...

People with higher autistic traits display stronger fluctuations in pupil size when presented with an optical illusion.

This article is an author response to three previous commentaries on 'Fetal testosterone and autistic traits' (Auyeung et al., 2009).

Research has linked Mirror-Touch (MT) synaesthesia with enhanced empathy. We test the largest sample of MT synaesthetes to date to examine two claims that have been previously made: that MT synaesthetes (1) have superior empathy; and (2) only ever experience their MT synaesthesia in response to viewing a person being touched. Given that autism has been suggested to involve deficits in cognitive...

Autism is a widely researched area and much emphasis has been placed in research on the differences between the autistic and non-autistic populations. Such research commonly draws on proposed deficits within people with autism in order to explain differences. This paper seeks to present an alternative understanding of differences and draws on writings of people with autism in such a discussion....

AIM To examine the role of the genetic component in the quantitative dermatoglyphic traits of autistic patients and their families, and the transmission of the autism. METHODS Finger and palm prints were taken from 120 autistic patients (92 males and 28 females), their parents (92 mothers and 70 fathers), 32 healthy brothers and 28 sisters, as well as 400 healthy controls (200 males and 200 f...

Adults show remarkable individual variation in the ability to detect felt enjoyment in smiles based on the Duchenne marker (Action Unit 6). It has been hypothesized that perceptual and attentional factors (possibly correlated to autistic-like personality traits in the normative range) play a major role in determining individual differences in recognition performance. Here, this hypothesis was t...