Intensive exposure to narrative in story books as a possibly effective treatment of social perspective-taking in schoolchildren with autism.

One of the major characteristics of autism is impairment of communication and socialization. While such impairment per se has been well documented, research into effective interventions for children with this developmental disorder is still limited. Here we present preliminary evidence for the possibility of improvement of the capability of social perspective-taking in schoolchildren with autism by having intensive experience with narrative, in which they were exposed to narrative in story books read by their parents over a consecutive 5- to 6-day-period.

Beyond disposition: the processing consequences of explicit and implicit invocations of empathy.

People often report empathizing with the trials and tribulations of others. While some accounts characterize empathy as a general tendency that individuals possess to differing degrees, an alternative, understudied view is that empathy emerges out of similarity-driven matches between potential targets and empathizers. The current project examines whether these matches, even when not explicitly identified, influence experiences of empathy, and whether that empathy has consequences for comprehension experiences.

[Effects of repetition and dual-task on output monitoring errors].

We investigated output-monitoring errors in a modified source-monitoring paradigm. Unlike the traditional paradigm that involves two phases, learning and monitoring, the modified paradigm involves three phases, learning, enactment, and monitoring. Three experiments produced two major findings.