Do victims’ emotions underlie preschoolers’ moral judgment abilities? Study 1 asked preschoolers (n072) to judge actions directed at characters who could and could not feel hurt and who did and did not cry. These judgments took into account only the nature of the action, not the nature of the victim. To further investigate how victims’ emotions might impact children’s moral judgments, Study 2 p...

The present study compared how parents of preschoolers with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) perceived and felt about participation in community activities. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 380 Hong Kong parents of preschoolers with ASD and 214 Hong Kong parents of preschoolers without ASD. The two groups were not different in their willingness and frequency of participation...

Comprehensive clinical diagnosis based on all available information is considered the "gold standard" in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We examined agreement across independent assessments (clinical judgment) of 34 young children (age 24-46 months) with suspected ASD, assessed by a multidisciplinary team, and final comprehensive clinical diagnosis. Agreement across settings and between each c...

BACKGROUND Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects many aspects of family life, such as social and economic burden. Little investigation of this phenomenon has been carried out in China. We designed this study to evaluate the employment and financial burdens of families with ASD-diagnosed preschoolers. METHODS Four hundred and fifty-nine nuclear families of children with ASD, 418 with some oth...

Many preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) present relative lack of receptive advantage over concurrent expressive language. Such profile emergence was investigated longitudinally in 54 infants at high-risk (HR) for ASD and 50 low-risk controls, with three language measures taken across four visits (around 7, 14, 24, 38 months). HR infants presented three outcome subgroups: ASD, oth...

The purpose of this study is to provide a microanalysis of differences in adaptive functioning seen between well-matched groups of school-aged children with autism and those diagnosed as having Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, all of whom functioned in the mild to moderate range of intellectual impairment. Findings indicate that the major area of difference between chil...

[This corrects the article on p. 143 in vol. 7, PMID: 27605914.].

All psychological theories, irrespective of their orientation (dynamic, cognitive, behavioural) agree that childhood environment influences later psychic development. Bowlby’s theory 1 2 states that the lack of a “secure base”, due to dysfunctional parent-child bonding, may predispose the child to develop mental disorders in adult life, and particularly Parental attitudes of mothers of patients...