Scoping review of behavioral coding measures used to evaluate parent responsiveness of children with autism or elevated risk of autism.

LAY ABSTRACT: The topic of how parents react (e.g., how they talk and act) to their child with autism or elevated likelihood of autism, often called parent responsiveness, has been studied by researchers for over 50 years. Many methods for measuring behaviors around parent responsiveness have been created depending on what researchers were interested in discovering. For example, some include only the behaviors that the parent does/says in reacting to something the child does/says. Other systems look at all behaviors in a period of time between child and parent (e.g., who talked/acted first, how much the child or parent said/did). The purpose of this article was to provide a summary of how and what researchers looked at around parent responsiveness, describe the strengths and barriers of these approaches, and suggest a "best practices" method of looking at parent responsiveness. The model suggested could make it more possible to look across studies to compare study methods and results. The model could be used in the future by researchers, clinicians, and policymakers to provide more effective services to children and their families.

Socialization of Early Prosocial Behavior: Parents' Talk about Emotions is Associated with Sharing and Helping in Toddlers.

What role does socialization play in the origins of prosocial behavior? We examined one potential socialization mechanism, parents' discourse about others' emotions with very young children in whom prosocial behavior is still nascent. Two studies are reported, one of sharing in 18- and 24-month-olds (n = 29), and one of instrumental and empathy-based helping in 18- and 30-month-olds (n = 62). In both studies, parents read age-appropriate picture books to their children and the content and structure of their emotion-related and internal state discourse were coded. Results showed that children who helped and shared more quickly and more often, especially in tasks that required more complex emotion understanding, had parents who more often asked them to label and explain the emotions depicted in the books. Moreover, it was parents' elicitation of children's talk about emotions rather than parents' own production of emotion labels and explanations that explained children's prosocial behavior, even after controlling for age. Thus, it is the quality, not the quantity, of parents' talk about emotions with their toddlers that matters for early prosocial behavior.

Child Behavior Checklist Scores for School-Aged Children with Autism: Preliminary Evidence of Patterns Suggesting the Need for Referral.

The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) is a widely used questionnaire to assess behavioral and emotional problems. It is often used as a diagnostic screener, but autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are not included in the CBCL for school-aged children. This study investigated patterns of CBCL scores in 108 children with high-functioning ASD from two independent samples, and 67 IQ- and age-matched controls. Scores on the CBCL Thought and Social Problems scales significantly differentiated children with ASD from controls. Both independent ASD samples had the same pattern of elevations, with mean scores over two standard deviations above the mean for Social, Thought, and Attention Problems. The Withdrawn/Depressed scale was elevated to at least the borderline clinical range for half of the ASD sample. This pattern of elevations is consistent with two prior studies of the CBCL with school-aged children with ASD, and therefore may warrant follow-up assessment to rule out an ASD.