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Research

“I Just Feel Like the Teacher Understood Me, and She Knew What I Needed”: School Experiences of Autistic Students from Diverse Backgrounds

Gathering Autistic young people's testimony is critical for understanding their lived experience of education and designing settings in which these students can thrive. Despite increasing knowledge in this field, we lack perspectives from a broad range of Autistic students which necessarily limits our ability to build inclusive, supportive environments for all. This study explored the educational experiences of preschool and school-aged Autistic students from diverse age groups, backgrounds, and educational settings.

Research

Harmonization of SDQ and ASEBA Phenotypes: Measurement Variance Across Cohorts

Harmonizing the scores obtained by different instruments that measure the same construct enable researchers to combine them in one analysis. An important step in harmonization is checking whether there is measurement invariance across populations.

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Child and Family Characteristics Associated with Symptoms of Anxiety in Autistic Children: A Biobank Study

Autistic children have an increased likelihood of anxiety, but more research is needed on the characteristics that predict various types of anxiety in this population. 

Research

Parsing the heterogeneity of social motivation in autism

Social motivation is posited as a key factor in the expression of the autism phenotype. However, lack of precision in both conceptualization and measurement has impeded a thorough understanding of its diverse presentation and associated outcomes. This study addresses this gap by identifying subgroups of autism characterized by deficits in distinct facets of social motivation, relative to normative benchmarks.

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Parent-reported Areas of Greatest Challenge for their ADHD and/or Autistic Children

This study aimed to understand how parents describe the most challenging behaviors exhibited by their children diagnosed with autism and/or ADHD, how those behaviours impact their family, and whether challenges are directly related to the core characteristics of these conditions. 

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Arcuate fasciculus and pre-reading language development in children with prenatal alcohol exposure

Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) contributes to widespread neurodevelopmental challenges, including reading, and has been associated with altered white matter. Here, we aimed to investigate whether arcuate fasciculus development is associated with pre-reading language skills in young children with PAE.

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Caregiver sensitivity predicts infant language use, and infant language complexity predicts caregiver language complexity, in the context of possible emerging autism

While theory supports bidirectional effects between caregiver sensitivity and language use, and infant language acquisition-both caregiver-to-infant and also infant-to-caregiver effects-empirical research has chiefly explored the former unidirectional path. In the context of infants showing early signs of autism, we investigated prospective bidirectional associations with 6-min free-play interaction samples collected for 103 caregivers and their infants (mean age 12-months; and followed up 6-months later).

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Sexually dimorphic facial features vary according to level of autistic-like traits in the general population

The current data provide support for Bejerot et al.'s androgyny account since males and females with high levels of autistic-like traits generally showed...

Research

Low maternal serum vitamin D during pregnancy and the risk for postpartum depression symptoms

Pregnancy is a time of vulnerability for vitamin D insufficiency, and there is an emerging literature associating low levels of 25(OH)-vitamin D with...

Research

Moving beyond behaviour-only assessment: Incorporating biomarkers to improve the early detection and diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders

This paper presents a response to the Camarata (2014) lead article regarding the accuracy and effectiveness of early identification and early intervention...