These notes consider how social communication differs in autistic individuals. It looks specifically at differences in joint attention, play, friendships and emotional recognition. It goes onto consider interventions that could be used, such as video modelling or social stories
- How do we develop and evaluate evidence based practice?
- Social interaction skills: why are they important? (screencast 1)
- Social interaction and autism
- How can we support autistic children to develop social and communication skills?
Social interaction skills
- Evidence based practice is the best available research with clinical expertise in context of
patient and characteristics
- Steps to developing EBP
o Needs of population – understand what the problems and strengths are
o Skills you want to develop to support needs
o Develop and test interventions
o Assess methodological quality of trials
o Synthesise results across trials
- All of us have social communication skills at varying times of our lives
o E.g. in an interview – greeting, answering questions
o E.g. sharing a house – negotiate cleaning, bills etc
Social skills – ability to perform behaviours such as eye contact, voice tone, social distance etc.
smaller skills adding up to social competence
Social competence – how good we are at relating to people. Could be measured by friendship
success, managing relationships etc
- Difficulties with social skills are a core diagnostic feature of autism
o Social emotional reciprocity such as abnormal social approach and failure to do back
and forth conversation
o Non verbal communication such as difficulty with eye contact and a lack of
understanding of gestures
o Developing, maintaining and understanding relationships
- Spence (2003) – social communication and interaction are central for successful
management of the social world
- Segrin (2019) – lower social skills precited increased depression and this was mediated by
positive relations with others
o Depressive symptoms were associated with stress and this was moderated by social
skills
- Crawford and Manassis (2011) – social risk factors such as social skills and friendship quality
contribute to incidence of victimisation
Social interaction and autism
, Joint attention – two people focus on an object or an event to interact
- In typical development it develops between 6 and 12 months and involves sharing and
coordination (Leekam and Moore, 2001)
Charman (2003)
- 18 infants with autism
- Measures at 20 months
o Spontaneous play task
o Joint attention tasks – activated toy task, goal detection tasks
o Imitation
- Symptom severity measured at 20 and 42 months
- Joint attention ability was positively associated with language gains and lower social and
communication symptoms
- Social and communication symptoms and imitation ability was positively associated with
language
Bruinsma et al. (2004)
- Response to joint attention – child’s response to parents point or shift in eye gaze
- Initiation of joint attention – child seeking another’s attention
Leekam et al. (2000) – attention and joint attention in autistic pre-schoolers
Experiment 1
- Test ability to orient to a person asking for attention and follow gaze direction
- 20 with autism and 20 without (but with developmental delay) - no info on comorbidity
such as ADHD
- Took place in uni lab – external validity?
- Experimenter interacted with child
o Attempted to get eye contact by looking, then calling name, then saying “look at
me”
- Gaze following
o Turned head 90 degrees to each side
o Activated target (train) and experimenter turned to look
o Test phase – activation of train was contingent on child matching direction of
experimenter turning
- Evidence of autism specific developmental delay in child-adult and child-adult-object
interaction
- Use of train as object – child who is more interested in trains may be more inclined to look
Experiment 2
- 19 children with ASD or developmental delay from a special needs nursery (those with DD
may have been autistic but late diagnosis)
- Set up identical to experiment 1
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