Visual perspective-taking is the ability to perceive the world from another person's perspective, and research on visual perspective-taking ability in children with autism spectrum conditions yielded inconsistent results. To solve a visual perspective-taking task, people can mentally rotate themselves to another person's location (embodied…

Humans need empathy to promote social interactions and to display prosocial behavior. Therefore, it is not surprising that low empathy skills are commonly seen as diagnostic features in several mental disorders. Empathy is an interesting topic in autism, since low empathy skills are responsible for the social difficulties that individuals with…

Games enable children to practice emotions in spaces that are free from actualized consequences. With thoughtful guidance, games can help children manage emotions, perspective-take, demonstrate empathic concern, and exhibit prosocial behaviors. Emerging research suggests that these competencies--also known as social and emotional learning (SEL)…

Basic perspective taking and mentalizing abilities develop in childhood, but recent studies indicate that the use of social perspective taking to guide decisions and actions has a prolonged development that continues throughout adolescence. Here, we aimed to replicate this research and investigate the hypotheses that individual differences in…

We examined 2 hypotheses concerning the development of "audience design" by contrasting children with and without autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) in referential communication. The 2-stage hypothesis predicts that the ability to use contrastive size adjectives for ambiguity avoidance develops separately from and faster than the ability…

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the…

Qualitative differences in social interaction style exist "within" the autism spectrum. In this study we examined whether these differences are associated with (1) the severity of autistic symptoms and comorbid disruptive behavior problems, (2) the child's psycho-social health, and (3) executive functioning and perspective taking skills. The…

Patterns of development of ToM belief abilities in intellectually disabled (ID) children and typically developing (TD) children matched on their developmental age were investigated. The links between cognition, language, social understanding and ToM belief abilities were examined. EDEI-R [Perron-Borelli M. (1996). "Echelles Differentielles…

Investigates the relationships among the first three stages of cognitive, role-taking, and moral development in both transitional and nontransitional subjects ages 5 to 14 years in order to determine whether the pattern of associations conformed more adequately to the "functional unity" model or to the "necessary but not…

Role-taking ability and level of moral development were measured in three groups of boys and girls including 16 moderately retarded adolescents (mean chronological age 15; mean mental age 9), 16 nonretarded adolescents matched for chronological age, and 16 nonretarded children matched for mental age. (CM)

Investigates two levels of the spontaneous inference of thinking in others (nonrecursive and recursive) in children of ages 10, 12, 14 and 16 using a person description task. (Author/SS)

This literature review addresses how the mental health professions view and use communication behaviors in their own diagnostic framework, focusing on cooccurrence of communication and psychiatric disorders, and psychiatrists' consideration of communication disorders as only one of a number of neurobehavioral systems. (JDD)

The Meta-Contrast Technique (MCT) was used to project, at the concrete perceptual level afforded by the test, two of the dilemmas confronting anxiety-ridden children: the threat against their uncertain sense of identity (revealed as fusion between the threat and the hero in the test) and the insufficiency of their defensive resources (revealed as…

Research in developmental social cognition should detail commonalities between self and other as well as the self-other differentiation process. A method which indexed developmental changes in the understanding of both intersubjective rules of interpersonal behavior and subjective individual perspectives was devised to research questions…