Lisa Capps

Narrative ability in high-functioning children with autism or Asperger's Syndrome

This study examines the narrative abilities of 28 high-functioning children with autism or Aspergers Syndrome and 22 typically developing children across two different discourse contexts. As compared with the typically developing children, the high-functioning group performed relatively well in the storybook context but exhibited difficulty imbuing their narratives of personal experience with the more sophisticated characteristics typically employed by the comparison group. Furthermore, children with autism or Aspergers Syndrome demonstrated impairments inferring and building on the underlying causal relationships both within and across story episodes in both narrative contexts. Findings further revealed that the narrative abilities of children with autism or Aspergers Syndrome were associated with performance on measures of emotional understanding, but not theory of mind or verbal IQ. Findings are discussed in relation to the social and emotional underpinnings of narrative discourse.

Just teasing: a conceptual analysis and empirical review.

Drawing on E. Goffmans concepts of face and strategic interaction, the authors define a tease as a playful provocation in which one person comments on something relevant to the target. This approach encompasses the diverse behaviors labeled teasing, clarifies previous ambiguities, differentiates teasing from related practices, and suggests how teasing can lead to hostile or affiliative outcomes. The authors then integrate studies of the content of teasing. Studies indicate that norm violations and conflict prompt teasing. With development, children tease in playful ways, particularly around the ages of 11 and 12 years, and understand and enjoy teasing more. Finally, consistent with hypotheses concerning contextual variation in face concerns, teasing is more frequent and hostile when initiated by high-status and familiar others and men, although gender differences are smaller than assumed. The authors conclude by discussing how teasing varies according to individual differences and culture.

Conversational Abilities Among Children with Autism and Children with Developmental Delays

While it is widely recognized that autism undercuts conversational ability, there has been little systematic examination of the involvement of children with autism in informal conversational interaction. This study compares the behaviour of 15 children with autism and 15 children with developmental delays matched on language ability within the context of a semi-structured conversation. Children with autism more often failed to respond to questions and comments, less often offered new, relevant contributions, and produced fewer narratives of personal experience. In contrast to prior research findings, groups did not differ with respect to use of gesture: several children with autism enhanced their communication through dramatization and pointing. Discussion focuses on the nature of pragmatic impairment in autism; factors underlying the development of conversational ability, including theory of mind; and practices that may promote communicative competence.

Attachment security in children with autism

Nineteen autistic children were examined in a modified version of Ainsworths Strange Situation. The attachment security of 15 children could be classified. Each of these children displayed disorganized attachment patterns, but almost half (40%) of them were subclassified as securely attached. To assess the validity of the attachment classifications, children and their mothers were observed in a separate interaction. Mothers of children who were subclassified as securely attached displayed greater sensitivity than mothers of children who were subclassified as insecurely attached. Children who were subclassified as securely attached more frequently initiated social interaction with their mothers than did children who were subclassified as insecurely attached. Children with secure and insecure subclassifications were compared to investigate correlations between attachment organization and representational ability and social-emotional understanding. Although children with underlying secure attachments were no more likely to initiate joint attention, they were more responsive to bids for joint attention, made requests more frequently, and demonstrated greater receptive language ability than children subclassified as insecurely attached. Discussion focuses on dynamics that may contribute to individual differences in the attachment organization of autistic children and on the reciprocal relationship between advances in our understanding of normal and pathological development.

Understanding of Emotional Experience in Autism: Insights From the Personal Accounts of High-Functioning Children With Autism

In this study, the authors investigate emotional understanding in autism through a discourse analytic framework to provide a window into childrens strategies for interpreting emotional versus nonemotional encounters and consider the implications for the mechanisms underlying emotional understanding in typical development. Accounts were analyzed for thematic content and discourse structure. Whereas high-functioning children with autism were able to discuss contextually appropriate accounts of simple emotions, their strategies for interpreting all types of emotional (but not nonemotional) experiences differed from those used by typically developing children. High-functioning children with autism were less inclined to organize their emotional accounts in personalized causal-explanatory frameworks and displayed a tendency to describe visually salient elements of experiences seldom observed among comparison children. Findings suggest that children with autism possess less coherent representations of emotional experiences and use alternative strategies for interpreting emotionally evocative encounters. Discussion focuses on the significance of these findings for informing the nature of emotional dysfunction in autism as well as implications for theories of emotional understanding in typical development.

Making Sense of Self-Conscious Emotion: Linking Theory of Mind and Emotion in Children With Autism

Self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment and shame are associated with 2 aspects of theory of mind (ToM): (a) the ability to understand that behavior has social consequences in the eyes of others and (b) an understanding of social norms violations. The present study aimed to link ToM with the recognition of self-conscious emotion. Children with and without autism identified facial expressions conscious of self-conscious and non-self-conscious emotions from photographs. ToM was also measured. Children with autism performed more poorly than comparison children at identifying self-conscious emotions, though they did not differ in the recognition of non-self-conscious emotions. When ToM ability was statistically controlled, group differences in the recognition of self-conscious emotion disappeared. Discussion focused on the links between ToM and self-conscious emotion.

Ambiguous Figure Perception and Theory of Mind Understanding in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders.

Researchers in early social-cognition have found that the ability to reverse an ambiguous figure is correlated with success on theory of mind tasks (e.g. Gopnik & Rosati, 2001). The present experiment examined children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) without mental delay to see whether a similar relationship existed. Ropar, Mitchell, and Ackroyd (2003) demonstrated that children with ASD with mental delay were impaired on theory of mind tasks, but were as likely as mentally delayed controls to generate both interpretations of an ambiguous figure when informed of its ambiguity. The present study replicated this finding on children with ASD without mental delay. However, overall perception of ambiguous figures was different. These children were less likely to spontaneously generate both interpretations of the figure, and more likely to perseverate on a single interpretation than the comparison children. Like Ropar et al., we found no correlation between theory of mind and informed reversals, but spontaneous reversals were correlated with performance on an advanced theory of mind task. These data suggest that reversals of ambiguous figures are linked to higher-level representational abilities, which might also be involved in social functioning, and impaired in children with ASD.

Out of place: Narrative insights into agoraphobia

This study explores how agoraphobia is realized through the activity of storytelling. Analysis of one agoraphobic womans narratives articulates (a) the narrative structuring of a panic episode, (b) the grammatical resources systematically recruited to portray panic as unaccountable and the protagonist as irrational and helpless, and (c) a recurrent communicative dilemma narrated in the setting, which anticipates the onset of panic. The narrator presents two conflicting accounts of panic: One foregrounded in her stories and in clinical literature links panic to an immediate activity and location; another backgrounded in her stories and heretofore unrecognized in the literature links panic to a failure to communicate unwillingness to participate in proposed activities that compromise the protagonists perceived well‐being. We conclude that agoraphobia is a communicative disorder that constructs a range of relationships. This study offers a methodology for researchers, clinicians, and sufferers of agoraphob...

Social and Cognitive Understanding in High-Functioning Children with Autism

One of the central concerns of our research program has been to identify the abilities and disabilities of autistic individuals. The purpose of this research is to determine the extent to which problems exist generally for autistic individuals in cognitive understanding of both people and objects, or more specifically, in social understanding. A second issue is whether the social unrelatedness observed in many autistic children stems primarily from a lack of interest in others or from a failure to understand others. These are difficult questions to address, and we have only partial answers. This chapter summarizes very briefly our conclusions based on our studies of 70 young children with autism and then discusses in detail the findings from a much smaller group of older, high-functioning children with autism.