1,721,017 research outputs found
ATTENZIONE CONGIUNTA E SVILUPPO DELLA COMPETENZA SOCIALE
No full textJoint attention is a fundamental human ability to regulate social attention and emotion reactions in the course of dynamic social interactions. In particular, joint attention serves to the function of monitoring and reciprocally integrate the interpersonal behaviour. This article describes the neurological basis of joint attention and its importance in the development of a variety of abilities, both in infants and in adults, like language, learning skills and advanced social abilities
I disturbi pervasivi dello sviluppo
No full textNella vita di tutti i giorni la dimensione sociale e comunicativa gioca
un ruolo fondamentale. E' attraverso il rapporto con gli altri, infatti,
che impariamo nuove cose, sperimentiamo nuove esperienze. Si
chiama intelligenza sociale la capacità di rappresentare e comunicare
pensieri e stati mentali su sé e sugli altri nei diversi contesti di
interazione. Se questa capacità è innata e automatica per molti, non
lo è, però, per le persone con Disturbo Pervasivo dello Sviluppo.
Questo volume rappresenta un tentativo di raccogliere i risultati degli
studi che hanno indagato questo tipo di disturbi da diverse
angolazioni, per poter proporre programmi di intervento efficaci per
migliorare la qualità della vita di queste persone
THE CLINICAL LAUSANNE TRILOGUE PLAY: AN OBSERVATIONAL STANDARDIZED TOOL TO SUPPORT AUTISTIC FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS: AN ITALIAN PILOT STUDY
No full textBackground: Recently, some contributions have highlighted the negative effect of parental stress upon the efficacy of interventions oriented towards the child with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who shows increasingly more behavioural problems at the parents’ increase of stress level (Osborne et al., 2008). Our study is aimed to assess the efficacy of a psychological support to parents and their children in terms of observed and perceived improvements in the quality of relationships. Methods: 10 families of children with an ASD will be assessed before and after a supportive intervention through a standardized observational procedure adapted from the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP, Fivaz-Depeursinge, Corboz-Warnery, 1999): the Clinical Lausanne Trilogue Play (CLTP; Malagoli, Mazzoni, 2006), used as a measure of the change as regards the family’s affective and behavioural functioning. Individual, from 0 (not adequate) to 2 (fully adequate), and family codes, from 0 (fully dysfunctional) to 40 (fully functional) will be scored. Children’s behaviours will be evaluated through the Autistic Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R, ADI-R; Le Couteur, Lord, & Rutter, 2003; Rutter, Le Couteur & Lord, 2003) and the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS: WPS Version; Lord, Rutter, DiLavore, & Risi, 1999). A portion of the parents will also be assessed both on their quality of attachment by means of Adult Attachment Interview (Main, Goldwyn, 1994-1998) and on their subjective level of stress as regards parenting through the administration of the Parenting Stress Index (Abidin, 1995). Expected results: Preliminary data (Vismara, Doneddu, 2009) have shown an improvement as regards family scores before and after intervention. It is expected that, at the beginning of intervention, the mean CLTP score will be within the dysfunctional alliances range; after intervention, we expect an improvement on family scores. Outcome will be analysed by 2-tailed paired t test. It is also expected that children’s problematic behaviours and parenting stress will decrease after intervention; whilst attachment representations should remain relatively stable, due to their nature. Conclusions: the study is aimed to give empirical evidence to the need to involve personally the parents and to consider their feelings and worries for their child in order to ameliorate the ability to share feelings and to develop inter-subjectivity processes
AUTISMO E SVILUPPO DELL'INTELLIGENZA SOCIALE
No full textAutistic Spectrum Disorders are characterized by significant impairments in social cognition, which consists in the ability to infer others’ mental states from complex combinations of behavioural cues. Social cognition includes a series of human information processes, specialized in the perception and in the analysis of social stimuli. After a brief description of the leading research areas that investigate social cognition, this article describes the psychological processes involved in this abilities and its underlie neural networks. Finally, the principal evidence-based intervention to promote social cognition in Autistic Spectrum Disordered are illustrated and discussed
Observing autistic family relationships: a pilot study on support intervention to parents and their children
No full textL'LTP clinico: studio pilota per valutare la qualità interattiva delle famiglie con bambino con disturbo pervasivo dello sviluppo
No full textL’uso delle storie sociali per promuovere l’interazione in classe negli alunni con disturbo dello spettro autistico
No full textMiddle school is particularly demanding experience for a student with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). At school, children must develop relationships with different teachers and with highly unpredictable peers. In order to help these students to cope with challenging circumstances, teachers need to learn how to use effective strategies that are developed to implement the social interaction of students with ASDs. In this study, we investigated the benefits of teachers’ use of social stories to promote social interaction of a student with ASDs in a mainstream middle school class. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of teacher intervention to promote changes in the quality ASDs student’s social interaction with peers
Assessing Joint Attention in Autism across Multiple Settings
No full textBackground: Clinical research indicates that the early impairment of Joint Attention (JA) seems to be central for the disturbance of social development in autism. In particular, young children with autism are characterized by a specific impairment in the capacity for Initiating JA (IJA) and Responding to JA (RJA). Considering that these deficits have been related to social symptom intensity, intervention responsiveness and long term social outcomes in autism (Mundy, 1995), an accurate assessment of early JA abilities in young children with autism might be crucial in order to define more specific and effective interventions.
Objectives: The present study wanted to explore the JA behaviours in young children with autism in multiple contexts and with different tools (direct observation and an interview to the parents), in order to determine how stable these behaviours are across different measures.
Methods: To achieve this aim we examined 20 participants with ASD (14 males; 6 females; aver.chron.age=34 mths; DS=9,56; aver. developmental age=23 mths; ds=8 mths) in the Early Social Communication Scales (Mundy et al., 2003) and in the ADOS. The parents completed the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS).
Results: In general, the children in our sample showed low scores in all the JA behaviors assessed across the two context of observation (ESCS and ADOS) and in the VABS. IJA was significantly correlated with the ADOS communication scores (r=-0.48; p0.05).
Conclusions: These results confirms that infant's joint attention behaviors reflects a robust aspects of social deficit in autism that is stable across different context of observation and accross different measures (direct vs indirect). They indicated also that different types of joint attention behaviors might be underestimated by classical diagnostic tools, such as the ADOS. For this reason, the assessments conducted in multiple context may provide a more valid measure of the child’s joint attention behaviors
The Shell Game: Investigating Spontaneous Response to Gaze Cueing of Attention in Children with High Functioning Autism
No full textBackground:
Deficits in joint attention development characterize autism and are thought to hinder social development and early language acquisition (Mundy & Burnette, 2005), therefore response to gaze cueing -the ability to shift visual attention in response to the observed eye gaze direction of another person- has been investigated in autism using different paradigms: Posner-style gaze-cueing tests demonstrated that purely reflexive perceptual aspects are intact even in very young children with autism (Chawarska et al., 2003; Swettenham et al. 2003) while performance in explicit gaze direction detection judgment tasks is impaired in older ones (Riby & Doherty 2009). However the use of verbally demanding tasks and explicit judgments about gaze-direction can be problematic when testing young children with autism.
Objectives:
We aimed to evaluate spontaneous response to gaze cueing of attention in young children with autism by means of an experimental stimulus in which an implicit goal elicits spontaneous response to gaze-cueing, while free visual explorations of the stimuli are recorded with an eye tracker.
Methods:
18 children with high-functioning autism (mean age 6.4 years, SD 2.1) and 18 age-matched controls (mean age 6.3 years, SD 1.10) participated. Participants were simply instructed to look at the videos presented with a Tobii-T60 eye-tracker. Each child saw 2 demonstrations and 2 test videos depicting an actor hiding an object under one of two identical opaque glasses, rotating them and then looking laterally for three times (without head turn) towards the glass that covered the object, before lifting it up. The hiding process was either visible (2 demonstrations) or hidden behind a screen (2 tests) thus in the demonstrations the observer could ignore the gaze-cue in order to find the object, while in the experimental conditions the gaze cue was the only visible feature leading to it. Statistical analysis compared fixations to key areas of the stimuli, namely Eyes, Gaze-Target and Non-Gaze-Target, qualitative analysis on gaze patterns evaluated response to gaze cueing.
Results:
The group comparison found statistically significant differences in attention towards the Gaze Target: Children with autism showed shorter fixations on the Gaze Target (p= 0.035) and spent lower time exploring it (p= 0.054). The qualitative analysis of the visual fixation patterns confirmed that children with autism as a group had a reduced tendency to follow the gaze cue (37% accuracy ), compared to typical controls (82% accuracy). Finally, paired samples t-tests within groups showed that control children made a significantly higher number of fixations to the Target Vs the Non Target (p=0.007), spent a significantly higher time on the Target rather than on the Non Target (p= 0.002) and made longer fixations to it (p<0.001) while no statistically significant differences were found for children with autism suggesting an inefficient differentiation between Target and Non target.
Conclusions:
Our data suggest that even though children with autism were less efficient than controls in perceiving and flexibly following the eye gaze cue they showed considerable residual gaze following abilities. Implications for treatment and further research will be discussed
The Clinical Lausanne Trilogue Play: Triadic relational resources in the context of autistic spectrum disorders
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