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 conditioni...

This study examined the relationship between autistic traits and adult attachment styles in a non-clinical sample of 326 university students. Multiple regression analysis was used to predict both attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety from levels of self-reported autistic traits. A significant unique relationship between autistic traits and attachment avoidance was found after controlling ...

BACKGROUND Recent research has indicated that autism is not a discrete disorder and that family members of autistic probands have an increased likelihood of exhibiting autistic symptoms with a wide range of severity, often below the threshold for a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder. OBJECTIVE To examine the distribution and genetic structure of autistic traits in the general population...

OBJECTIVE Disorders on the autism spectrum, as well as autistic traits in the general population, have been found to be both highly stable across age and highly heritable at individual ages. However, little is known about the overlap in genetic and environmental influences on autistic traits across age and the contribution of such influences to trait stability itself. The present study investig...

CONTEXT Genetic factors play an important role in the etiology of both autism spectrum disorders and autistic traits. However, little is known about the etiologic consistency of autistic traits across levels of severity. OBJECTIVE To compare the etiology of typical variation in autistic traits with extreme scoring groups (including top 1%) that mimicked the prevalence of diagnosed autism spec...

BACKGROUND Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are highly heritable, but the exact etiological mechanisms underlying the condition are still unclear. METHODS Using a multiple rater twin design in a large sample of general population preschool twins, this study aimed to (a) estimate the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to autistic traits, controlling for the possible effects of ra...

This study focused on the degree of report bias in assessing autistic traits. Both parents of 124 preschoolers completed the Social Communication Questionnaire and the Autism-spectrum Quotient. Acceptable agreement existed between mother and father reports of children's mean scores of autistic traits, but interrater reliability for rank-order correlations was only fair. No evidence was found fo...

Background: Twin, family, and linkage studies have indicated that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) share a portion of their heritable etiology. This suggests that individuals with ADHD may manifest different forms of ASDs that may range from fully developed syndromic forms of the disorder to milder manifestations of ASD symptomatology, which w...

Autistic traits are characterized by social and communication problems, restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities. The relation between autistic traits and personality characteristics is largely unknown. This study focused on the relation between five specific autistic traits measured with the abridged version of the Autism Spectrum Quotient ("social ...

It is common to administer measures of autistic traits to those without autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) with, for example, the aim of understanding autistic personality characteristics in non-autistic individuals. Little research has examined the extent to which measures of autistic traits actually measure the same traits in the same way across those with and without an ASD. We addressed this ...