Cultural adaptation and preliminary validation of the Flexibility Scale for Spain.

Background: Individuals exhibit varying degrees of flexibility depending on different characteristics, conditions, and diagnoses. The Flexibility Scale is a comprehensive informant-report measure used to assess multiple aspects of flexibility in autistic and non-autistic children and youth, with an emphasis on cognitive aspects. This tool has not been adapted nor validated for use in Spain.

What does it take to be rigid? Reflections on the notion of rigidity in autism.

Characterizations of autism include multiple references to rigid or inflexible features, but the notion of rigidity itself has received little systematic discussion. In this paper we shed some light on the notion of rigidity in autism by identifying different facets of this phenomenon as discussed in the literature, such as fixed interests, insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, black-and-white mentality, intolerance of uncertainty, ritualized patterns of verbal and non-verbal behavior, literalism, and discomfort with change. Rigidity is typically approached in a disjointed fashion (i.

The structure underlying core affect and perceived affective qualities of human vocal bursts.

Vocal bursts are non-linguistic affectively-laden sounds with a crucial function in human communication, yet their affective structure is still debated. Studies showed that ratings of valence and arousal follow a V-shaped relationship in several kinds of stimuli: high arousal ratings are more likely to go on a par with very negative or very positive valence. Across two studies, we asked participants to listen to 1,008 vocal bursts and judge both how they felt when listening to the sound (i.

The Role of Inner Speech in Executive Functioning Tasks: Schizophrenia With Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and Autistic Spectrum Conditions as Case Studies.

Several theories propose that one of the core functions of inner speech (IS) is to support subjects in the completion of cognitively effortful tasks, especially those involving executive functions (EF). In this paper we focus on two populations who notoriously encounter difficulties in performing EF tasks, namely, people diagnosed with schizophrenia who experience auditory verbal hallucinations (Sz-AVH) and people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). We focus on these two populations because they represent two different ways in which IS can fail to help in EF tasks, which can be illustrative for other mental conditions.

When emotion and cognition do (not) work together: Delusions as emotional and executive dysfunctions.

In this commentary, I argue that the cognitive-emotional framework put forward by Pessoa (2013) can be successfully applied to psychopathology and, in particular, to the reasoning of delusional subjects. More specifically, I show that the notion of executive competition (Ch. 7) offers a significant contribution to the idea that delusions may involve both executive and emotional dysfunctions.