Characterization of dyadic interaction features between fathers and mothers playing with their autistic children.

Background: Socio-communicative difficulties are a core symptom of autism that deeply impact interaction with others. Despite that, research on bidirectional caregiver-child interaction variables has been notably scant and predominantly focused on autistic children's interactive differences and the consequences on parenting behaviors.

Aim: The study aimed to assess parent-child interaction in the context of autism through observational validated instruments that consider qualitative and structural features in a complementary way to obtain a comprehensive characterization of the exchange within the dyad.

Child-therapist interaction features impact Autism treatment response trajectories.

Background: Identifying mechanisms of change in Autism treatment may help explain response variability and maximize efficacy. For this, the child-therapist interaction could have a key role as stressed by developmental models of intervention, but still remains under-investigated.

Aims: The longitudinal study of treatment response trajectories considering both baseline and child-therapist interaction features by means of predictive modeling.

Interpersonal synchrony: Interaction variables and gender differences in preschoolers with ASD.

Background: Females with ASD tend to be under-recognized as they might present a different symptom manifestation, better social abilities, and masking behaviors. Since the main limitation of current literature on gender differences is represented by focusing on broad constructs, research needs to prioritize narrower constructs related to the subdomains of social abilities. Hence, the aim of this work was to explore gender differences in Interpersonal Synchrony of children with ASD.

Quantifying the Child-Therapist Interaction in ASD Intervention: An Observational Coding System.

Background: Observational research plays an important part in developmental research due to its noninvasiveness. However, it has been hardly applied to investigate efficacy of the child-therapist interaction in the context of naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBI). In particular, the characteristics of child-therapist interplay are thought to have a significant impact in NDBIs in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).