Autistic People's Experience of Empathy and the Autistic Empathy Deficit Narrative.

Background: There is a dominant discourse, both in clinical texts and throughout the academic literature, that autistic people lack empathy; however, over the past decade, both clinicians and academics have increasingly rejected deficit-based descriptions of autism in favor of more nuanced explanations of the experience of autistic individuals in a social world.

Methods: This study asked 76 autistic individuals about their own experience of empathy and the oft-cited empathy deficit. Data were thematically analyzed and revealed a wide array of empathic self-concepts among respondents.

The moderating effects of mindfulness facets on psychological distress and emotional eating behaviour.

Background: Emotional eating is an impulsive mood-regulation strategy that often follows psychological distress. Mindfulness is associated with less impulsive behaviour. Mindful eating involves a considered awareness of hunger and satiety, and conscious, non-automatic, food choices.

Social conformity and autism spectrum disorder: a child-friendly take on a classic study.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the importance of conformity as a theoretical construct in social psychology and the profound implications autism has for social function, little research has been done on whether autism is associated with the propensity to conform to a social majority. This study is a modern, child-friendly implementation of the classic Asch conformity studies. The performance of 15 children with autism was compared to that of 15 typically developing children on a line judgement task.

Optimal time-of-day and consolidation of learning in younger and older adults.

The current study investigated the relationship between intraindividual variability and associative learning in younger and older adults. The authors hypothesized that higher levels of intraindividual variability would be associated with a reduction in the benefits of practice during learning, and that nonoptimal testing times would magnify these effects. Results indicated that older adults showed an increase in reaction time (RT) standard deviation (SD) relative to mean RT in the evening.