Outcomes of real-world social interaction for autistic adults paired with autistic compared to typically developing partners.

Differences in social communication and interaction styles between autistic and typically developing have been studied in isolation and not in the context of real-world social interaction. The current study addresses this "blind spot" by examining whether real-world social interaction quality for autistic adults differs when interacting with typically developing relative to autistic partners. Participants (67 autism spectrum disorder, 58 typically developing) were assigned to one of three dyadic partnerships (autism-autism:  = 22; typically developing-typically developing:  = 23; autism-typically developing:  = 25; 55 complete dyads, 15 partial dyads) in which they completed a 5-min unstructured conversation with an unfamiliar person and then assessed the quality of the interaction and their impressions of their partner.

Do First Impressions of Autistic Adults Differ Between Autistic and Nonautistic Observers?

Background: Autistic adults receive unfavorable first impressions from typically developing (TD) adults, but these impressions improve when TD adults are made aware of their diagnosis. It remains unclear, however, how autistic adults form first impressions of other autistic adults, and whether their impressions are similarly affected by diagnostic awareness.

Methods: In this study, 32 autistic and 32 TD adults viewed brief videos of 20 TD and 20 autistic adults presented either with or without their diagnostic status and rated them on character traits and their interest in interacting with them in the future.

Variability in first impressions of autistic adults made by neurotypical raters is driven more by characteristics of the rater than by characteristics of autistic adults.

Previous work indicates that first impressions of autistic adults are more favorable when neurotypical raters know their clinical diagnosis and have high understanding about autism, suggesting that social experiences of autistic adults are affected by the knowledge and beliefs of the neurotypical individuals they encounter. Here, we examine these patterns in more detail by assessing variability in first impression ratings of autistic adults ( = 20) by neurotypical raters ( = 505). Variability in ratings was driven more by characteristics of raters than those of autistic adults, particularly for items related to "intentions to interact.

Brief Report: Adults with Autism are Less Accurate at Predicting How Their Personality Traits are Evaluated by Unfamiliar Observers.

Social cognitive impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are well-documented, yet little research has examined whether ASD is also characterized by difficulties in meta-perception, or the ability to gauge how one is perceived. In this study, ASD and TD adults (N = 22) largely did not differ on the self-perception of their personality traits or on how they expected to be perceived by unfamiliar observers. However adults with ASD were rated less favorably by TD observers (N = 412) on 19 out of 20 personality items, and adults with ASD were less accurate at predicting how they would be perceived.

Production and perception of emotional prosody by adults with autism spectrum disorder.

Unlabelled: This study examined production and perception of affective prosody by adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous research has reported increased pitch variability in talkers with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) controls in grammatical speaking tasks (e.g.

Neurotypical Peers are Less Willing to Interact with Those with Autism based on Thin Slice Judgments.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including those who otherwise require less support, face severe difficulties in everyday social interactions. Research in this area has primarily focused on identifying the cognitive and neurological differences that contribute to these social impairments, but social interaction by definition involves more than one person and social difficulties may arise not just from people with ASD themselves, but also from the perceptions, judgments, and social decisions made by those around them. Here, across three studies, we find that first impressions of individuals with ASD made from thin slices of real-world social behavior by typically-developing observers are not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls, but also are associated with reduced intentions to pursue social interaction.

Context Effects on Facial Affect Recognition in Schizophrenia and Autism: Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Evidence.

Although Schizophrenia (SCZ) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) share impairments in emotion recognition, the mechanisms underlying these impairments may differ. The current study used the novel "Emotions in Context" task to examine how the interpretation and visual inspection of facial affect is modulated by congruent and incongruent emotional contexts in SCZ and ASD. Both adults with SCZ (n= 44) and those with ASD (n= 21) exhibited reduced affect recognition relative to typically-developing (TD) controls (n= 39) when faces were integrated within broader emotional scenes but not when they were presented in isolation, underscoring the importance of using stimuli that better approximate real-world contexts.

The broad autism phenotype predicts relationship outcomes in newly formed college roommates.

Although previous studies have reported that the broad autism phenotype is associated with reduced relationship quality within established relationships, understanding how this association emerges requires assessment prior to relationship development. In the present longitudinal study, college roommates with minimal familiarity prior to cohabitation (N = 162) completed the broad autism phenotype questionnaire and intermittently reported on their relationship quality and interpersonal behaviors toward their roommate over their first 10 weeks of living together. Actor-Partner Interdependence Models demonstrated that roommates mismatched on aloofness (one high and one low) had lower relationship satisfaction than those matched on it, with the interpersonal behavior of warmth mediating this association.

When father doesn't know best: selective disagreement between self-report and informant report of the broad autism phenotype in parents of a child with autism.

The Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ) is a reliable tool for identifying three autism-related traits-social aloofness, pragmatic language abnormalities and rigid personality--within families of a person with autism and the general population. Although little is known concerning agreement between self-report and informant report versions of the BAPQ, identifying individual characteristics affecting agreement between the two can highlight important considerations for maximizing its yield, particularly when only one version is administered. Here, analysis of self-report and informant report of the BAPQ completed by 444 parents of a child with autism revealed moderate to strong agreement between the two versions for all three broad autism phenotype (BAP) traits when the self-reporting parent did not possess the trait being assessed.

Evaluating posed and evoked facial expressions of emotion from adults with autism spectrum disorder.

Though many studies have examined facial affect perception by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), little research has investigated how facial expressivity in ASD is perceived by others. Here, naïve female observers (n = 38) judged the intensity, naturalness and emotional category of expressions produced by adults with ASD (n = 6) and typically developing (TD) adults (n = 6) in both a posed condition and an evoked condition in which emotions were naturalistically elicited and validated. ASD expressions were rated as more intense and less natural than TD expressions but contrary to prediction were identified with greater accuracy, an effect driven primarily by angry expressions.