Jessica A. Hobson

Qualities of Symbolic Play Among Children with Autism: A Social-Developmental Perspective

We hypothesized that the qualities of play shown by children with autism reflect their impoverished experience of identifying with other people’s attitudes and moving among person-anchored perspectives. On this basis, we predicted their play should manifest a relative lack of the social-developmental hallmarks that typify creative symbolic functioning. We videotaped the spontaneous and modelled symbolic play of matched groups of children with and without autism. The two groups were similar in the mechanics of play, for example in making one thing stand for another and using materials flexibly. By contrast, and as predicted, children with autism were rated as showing less playful pretend involving self-conscious awareness of pretending, investment in the symbolic meanings given to play materials, creativity, and fun.

How mothers with borderline personality disorder relate to their year-old infants

BACKGROUND Women with borderline personality disorder have conflictual interpersonal relations that may extend to disrupted patterns of interaction with their infants. AIMS To assess how women with borderline personality disorder engage with their 12 to 18-month-old infants in separation-reunion episodes. METHOD We videotaped mother-infant interactions in separation-reunion episodes of the Strange Situation test. The mothers were women with borderline personality disorder, with depression, or without psychopathological disorder. Masked ratings of maternal behaviour were made with the Atypical Maternal Behavior Instrument for Assessment and Classification. RESULTS As predicted, a higher proportion (85%) of women with borderline personality disorder than women in the comparison groups showed disrupted affective communication with their infants. They were also distinguished by the prevalence of frightened/disoriented behaviour. CONCLUSIONS Maternal borderline personality disorder is associated with dysregulated mother-infant communication.

Sensory Sensitivities and Performance on Sensory Perceptual Tasks in High-functioning Individuals with Autism

Most reports of sensory symptoms in autism are second hand or observational, and there is little evidence of a neurological basis. Sixty individuals with high-functioning autism and 61 matched typical participants were administered a sensory questionnaire and neuropsychological tests of elementary and higher cortical sensory perception. Thirty-two percent of autism participants endorsed more sensory sensitivity items than any control participants. Both groups made few errors on elementary sensory perception items. Controls made few errors on higher cortical sensory perception items, but 30% of the autism participants made high numbers of errors. These findings support the common occurrence of sensory symptoms in high functioning autism based on first person report, and the presence of neurological abnormalities in higher cortical sensory perception.

Anticipatory concern. A study in autism

There has been substantial research on childrens empathic responsiveness towards distressed people, and on the limited responsiveness of children with autism. To date, however, there have not been experimental studies to test how far children show concern towards someone who might be expected to feel badly, when that person has not (yet) expressed any negative feelings. We tested matched groups of children with autism and learning disability, and typically developing children of similar verbal mental age (approximately 6 years), with a novel procedure in which participants witnessed one person (E1) tearing the drawing of another (E2). In a comparison condition, a blank card was torn. In the torn-drawing condition, as predicted, fewer participants with autism orientated towards E2 with an immediate look, and as a group, they were rated as showing less concern for, and fewer concerned looks towards, E2. We discuss possible implications for theoretical perspectives on the early development of empathy in typically as well as atypically developing children.

Infant Responding to Joint Attention, Executive Processes, and Self-Regulation in Preschool Children

Infant joint attention is related to behavioral and social outcomes, as well as language in childhood. Recent research and theory suggests that the relations between joint attention and social-behavioral outcomes may reflect the role of executive self-regulatory processes in the development of joint attention. To test this hypothesis two studies were conducted. The first, cross-sectional study examined the development of responding to joint attention (RJA) skill in terms of increasing executive efficiency of responding between 9 and 18 months of age. The results indicated that development of RJA was characterized by a decreased latency to shift attention in following another persons gaze and head turn, as well as an increase in the proportion of correct RJA responses exhibited by older infants. The second study examined the longitudinal relations between 12-month measures of responding to joint attention and 36-month attention regulation in a delay of gratification task. The results indicated that responding to joint attention at 12-months was significantly related to childrens use of three types of self-regulation behaviors while waiting for a snack reward at 36 months of age. These observations are discussed in light of a developmental theory of attention regulation and joint attention in infancy.

Only connect? Communication, identification, and autism.

Abstract In this paper, we elaborate a theoretical position and report an empirical study on a specific form of interpersonal engagement: the propensity to identify with the subjective orientation of another person. On the basis of a hypothesis that individuals with autism have a relative lack of this form of intersubjective connectedness (Hobson, 1993, 2002), we predicted that children and adolescents with autism would contrast with matched participants without autism (n=12 per group) in specific aspects of communication when someone requested them to “Get Pete to do this” and demonstrated actions in Petes absence. As predicted, on blind ratings of videotapes of participants’ communication, those with autism achieved lower scores on four indices of identification that were selected a priori: emotional engagement, sharing experience in joint attention, communication of style, and shifting in communicative role. The two groups were almost completely separate on a composite measure of identification. We consider the implications of these findings for typical and atypical development.

Dialogic resonance and intersubjective engagement in autism

Abstract How can we investigate the relation between language and the human capacity for intersubjective engagement? Here we combine insights from linguistics and psychology to study the language of children with autism. We begin by reviewing why it might be worthwhile to study autism from the perspective of dialogic resonance, defined as the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances. Then we report on a controlled study of conversations involving individual children with autism and an interested adult interviewer. According to reliable ratings of the transcribed conversations, each considered as a whole, the speech of participants with autism was characterized by atypical forms of dialogic resonance. On the other hand, the children with autism were similar to control participants insofar as their conversations manifested “typically developed frame grabs” in which dialogic resonance was accompanied by a coherent expansion. These findings were compatible with those that emerged from utterance-by-utterance analyses of the same conversations reported elsewhere (Hobson et al. 2012). To complement the quantitative findings, we present illustrative excerpts of language use. We consider how dialogic resonance relates to structural priming, and consider implications for understanding the relations among intersubjectivity, language, and autism.

Symbolizing as interpersonally grounded shifts in meaning: social play in children with and without autism.

The aim of this study was to examine the relation between symbolic play and communicative engagement among children with and without autism. Our predictions were firstly, that in moment-by-moment interactions during semi-structured interactive play with an adult, children with and without autism would tend to show shifts in meanings in symbolic play when engaged in coordinated states of joint engagement (events involving ‘sharing-of-meaning’); secondly, that across atypically developing participants, sharing-of-meaning would (a) correlate with scores on a standardized test of pretend play, and (b) be inversely correlated with scores on the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule; and finally, that participants with autism would contrast with matched developmentally delayed participants in manifesting lower levels of joint engagement, lower levels of symbolic play, and fewer shifts in symbolic meaning. Each of these predictions was borne out. The intimate developmental relation between social engagement and symbolic play appears to be important for explaining the developmental psychopathology of autism.

The Relationship Development Assessment – Research Version: Preliminary validation of a clinical tool and coding schemes to measure parent-child interaction in autism

The aim of this project was to replicate and extend findings from two recent studies on parent-child relatedness in autism (Beurkens, Hobson, & Hobson, 2013; Hobson, Tarver, Beurkens, & Hobson, 2013, under review) by adapting an observational assessment and coding schemes of parent-child relatedness for the clinical context and examining their validity and reliability. The coding schemes focussed on three aspects of relatedness: joint attentional focus (Adamson, Bakeman, & Deckner, 2004), the capacity to co-regulate an interaction and the capacity to share emotional experiences. The participants were 40 children (20 with autism, 20 without autism) aged 6–14, and their parents. Parent-child dyads took part in the observational assessment and were coded on these schemes. Comparisons were made with standardised measures of autism severity (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, ADOS: Lord, Rutter, DiLavore, & Risi, 2001; Social Responsiveness Scale, SRS: Constantino & Gruber, 2005), relationship quality (Parent Child Relationship Inventory, PCRI: Gerard, 1994) and quality of parent-child interaction (Dyadic Coding Scales, DCS: Humber & Moss, 2005). Inter-rater reliability was very good and, as predicted, codes both diverged from the measure of parent-child relationship and converged with a separate measure of parent-child interaction quality. A detailed profile review revealed nuanced areas of group and individual differences which may be specific to verbally-able school-age children. The results support the utility of the Relationship Development Assessment – Research Version for clinical practice.