Assessing Child Life Specialists' Management of Challenging Behaviors in Autistic Pediatric Patients.

Given that autistic children are hospitalized at higher rates than neurotypical peers, it is important to understand the autism-specific preparedness of healthcare providers. Certified Child Life Specialists (CCLSs) play a crucial role in pediatric hospitalizations by providing socioemotional support and coping strategies. The present study assessed perceived competency and comfort levels among 131 CCLSs regarding the management of challenging behaviors exhibited by autistic pediatric patients, including aggression and self-injury.

Social-interactive reward elicits similar neural response in autism and typical development and predicts future social experiences.

Challenges in initiating and responding to social-interactive exchanges are a key diagnostic feature of autism spectrum disorder, yet investigations into the underlying neural mechanisms of social interaction have been hampered by reliance on non-interactive approaches. Using an innovative social-interactive neuroscience approach, we investigated differences between youth with autism and youth with typical development in neural response to a chat-based social-interactive reward, as well as factors such as age and self-reported social enjoyment that may account for heterogeneity in that response. We found minimal group differences in neural and behavioral response to social-interactive reward, and variation within both groups was related to self-reported social enjoyment during the task.

Everyone's a Critic (Sometimes): Young Children Show High Awareness of, But Lower Adherence to, Prosocial Lying Norms.

From an early age, children are taught norms about socially-acceptable behaviors; however, children's ability to recognize these norms often predates their tendency to follow them. This conflict between understanding and action has been predominantly studied in cases when enacting the norm would be costly for the child (i.e.

Disentangling relations between attention to the eyes and empathy.

Social interactions involve an interplay between lower-level social perceptual biases and higher-level cognition and affect. One particularly important building block of social interaction is attention to others' eyes. Previous research has found links between individual differences in eye-looking and complex social capacities, including empathy.

Explaining Variance in Social Symptoms of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The social symptoms of autism spectrum disorder are likely influenced by multiple psychological processes, yet most previous studies have focused on a single social domain. In school-aged autistic children (n = 49), we compared the amount of variance in social symptoms uniquely explained by theory of mind (ToM), biological motion perception, empathy, social reward, and social anxiety. Parent-reported emotional contagion-the aspect of empathy in which one shares another's emotion-emerged as the most important predictor, explaining 11-14% of the variance in social symptoms, with higher levels of emotional contagion predicting lower social symptom severity.

Young children's willingness to deceive shows in-group bias only in specific social contexts.

The ability to deceive others is an early-emerging and socially complex skill, but relatively little is known about when and how a social partner's identity affects young children's willingness to lie. To understand how group membership affects children's lying, we used a minimal group paradigm to examine children's willingness to deceive in-group and out-group members across varied contexts that systematically varied in their costs and benefits. A total of 69 children aged 4 to 7 years played three versions of a sticker-hiding game: a Self-Benefit scenario (child could lie for personal gain), an Other-Benefit scenario (child could lie to help someone else), and a No-Benefit scenario (child could lie to spite someone else).

Minimal coherence among varied theory of mind measures in childhood and adulthood.

Theory of mind-or the understanding that others have mental states that can differ from one's own and reality-is currently measured across the lifespan by a wide array of tasks. These tasks vary across dimensions including modality, complexity, affective content, and whether responses are explicit or implicit. As a result, theoretical and meta-analytic work has begun to question whether such varied approaches to theory of mind should be categorized as capturing a single construct.

Social and delay discounting in autism spectrum disorder.

Current literature is divided over whether and how processes such as perspective taking and reward sensitivity differ between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) versus neurotypical individuals. Discounting tasks may provide novel insight into how these processes operate. In delay discounting tasks, participants choose between smaller immediate rewards and larger delayed rewards, and in social discounting tasks, participants choose between a smaller monetary rewards for themselves versus a larger reward for partners of varied social distance (e.

Social interaction recruits mentalizing and reward systems in middle childhood.

Social cognition develops in the context of reciprocal social interaction. However, most neuroimaging studies of mentalizing have used noninteractive tasks that may fail to capture important aspects of real-world mentalizing. In adults, social-interactive context modulates activity in regions linked to social cognition and reward, but few interactive studies have been done with children.

A Social-Interactive Neuroscience Approach to Understanding the Developing Brain.

From birth onward, social interaction is central to our everyday lives. Our ability to seek out social partners, flexibly navigate and learn from social interactions, and develop social relationships is critically important for our social and cognitive development and for our mental and physical health. Despite the importance of our social interactions, the neurodevelopmental bases of such interactions are underexplored, as most research examines social processing in noninteractive contexts.

Developmental relations between amygdala volume and anxiety traits: Effects of informant, sex, and age.

Although substantial human and animal evidence suggests a role for the amygdala in anxiety, literature linking amygdala volume to anxiety symptomatology is inconclusive, with studies finding positive, negative, and null results. Clarifying this brain-behavior relation in middle to late childhood is especially important, as this is a time both of amygdala structural maturation and the emergence of many anxiety disorders. The goal of the current study was to clarify inconsistent findings in previous literature by identifying factors moderating the relation between amygdala volume and anxiety traits in a large sample of typically developing children aged 6-13 years (N = 72).

Let's chat: developmental neural bases of social motivation during real-time peer interaction.

Humans are motivated to interact with each other, but the neural bases of social motivation have been predominantly examined in non-interactive contexts. Understanding real-world social motivation is of special importance during middle childhood (ages 8-12), a period when social skills improve, social networks grow, and social brain networks specialize. To assess interactive social motivation, the current study used a novel fMRI paradigm in which children believed they were chatting with a peer.