Exploring social cognition and romantic self-efficacy in autistic young adults: Better social awareness is associated with lower confidence.

Background: Despite misconceptions, autistic young adults are interested in romantic relationships (Fernandes et al., 2016; Hancock et al., 2019; Mehzabin & Stokes, 2011).

Early emotional caregiving environment and associations with memory performance and hippocampal volume in adolescents with prenatal drug exposure.

Early adversities, including prenatal drug exposure (PDE) and a negative postnatal emotional caregiving environment, impact children's long-term development. The protracted developmental course of memory and its underlying neural systems offer a valuable framework for understanding the longitudinal associations of pre- and postnatal factors on children with PDE. This study longitudinally examines memory and hippocampal development in 69 parent-child dyads to investigate how the early caregiving emotional environment affects children with PDE's neural and cognitive systems.

Sexual Knowledge, Experiences, and Pragmatic Language in Adults With and Without Autism: Implications for Sex Education.

Autistic adults have similar levels of desire for sexual and romantic relationships as their non-autistic peers. However, autistic adults are less likely to be in relationships and have less dating experience. We compared sexual knowledge, experiences, and pragmatic language ability in a community sample of young adults with (n = 27, mean age = 22.