BACKGROUND Difficulties in appropriate social interaction are characteristic of both children with autism spectrum disorders and children with callous-unemotional traits (who are at risk of developing psychopathy). Extant experimental studies suggest that the nature of atypical social cognition that characterises these two profiles is not identical. However, 'empathizing' difficulties have been...

Purpose This study aims to investigate the influence of social camouflaging on victimisation and offending in relation autism pathological demand avoidance (PDA) traits. Camouflaging overcome or conceal difficulties communication skills. Autistic individuals report response threat being verbally physically assaulted when they have not camouflaged. Thus, could be associated with victimisation. a...

Limited perspective taking or "Theory of Mind" (ToM) abilities are a core deficit of autism, and many interventions are aimed to improve ToM abilities. In this study, we investigated the effectiveness of a ToM treatment for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and, for the first time, the moderating roles of social interaction style (SIS) and disruptive behavior (DB), to determine whic...

Limited use of contextual information has been suggested as a way of understanding cognition in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it has also been argued that individuals with ASD may have difficulties inferring others' mental states. Here, we examined how individuals with different levels of autistic traits respond to contextual deviations by measuring event-related potentia...

BACKGROUND It has been questioned whether the process of twinning might be a risk factor for autism spectrum conditions (ASC) and autistic traits. AIM We sought to determine whether autistic traits and probable disorder, as measured by the Childhood Autism Spectrum Test (CAST), were more pronounced in twins compared to singletons. SAMPLES Data were analyzed from two large population-based s...

The Extreme Male Brain (EMB) theory posits that autistic traits are linked to excessive exposure to testosterone in utero. While findings from a number of studies are consistent with this theory, other studies have produced contradictory results. For example, some findings suggest that rather than being linked to hypermasculinization for males, or defeminization for females, elevated levels of ...

Objective: To examine the overlap between autistic traits and other behavioural problems in a general population sample, and explore whether this overlap is of genetic or environmental origin. Method: Youth Self Report (YSR) data were collected in a general population sample of 424 twin pairs at 8 years of age, and their non-twin siblings. In 97 of these families self-report ratings on the Au...

Diminished responsivity to reward incentives is a key contributor to the social-communication problems seen in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Social motivation theories suggest that individuals with ASD do not experience social interactions as rewarding, leading to negative consequences for the development of brain circuitry subserving social information. In this study, we examined neural re...