School-Based Approaches in Youth with Psychosis.

A major recovery milestone for youth affected by psychosis is reintegration back into a school setting, an important, attainable, treatment goal. The emergence of psychosis often results in either an onset or exacerbation of prior neurocognitive and learning challenges for affected students. Gold standard practice in clinical care for psychosis comprises comprehensive supportive educational services explicitly focused on successful academic reintegration and achievement. This article discusses how providers can guide school teams and their institutions to identify psychosis in their student populations along with a delineation of key educational programming that helps youth reintegrate back into school and achieve academic success.

Validation of the Pictorial Infant Communication Scale for preschool-aged children with autism spectrum disorder.

Joint attention, or the shared focus of attention between objects or events and a social partner, is a crucial milestone in the development of social communication and a notable area of deficit in children with autism spectrum disorder. While valid parent-report screening measures of social communication are available, the majority of these measures are designed to assess a wide range of behaviors. Targeted assessment of joint attention and related skills is primarily limited to semi-structured, examiner-led interactions, which are time-consuming and laborious to score. The Pictorial Infant Communication Scale is an efficient parent-report measure of joint attention that can be used as a complement to structured assessments in fully characterizing early social communication development. This study examined the psychometric properties of the Pictorial Infant Communication Scale. Results revealed a high degree of internal consistency and strong intercorrelations between subscales. Additionally, confirmatory factor analysis supported a three-factor model of joint attention. Furthermore, significant correlations between the Pictorial Infant Communication Scale and direct clinical measures of child joint attention, language skills, and autism spectrum disorder symptom severity were suggestive of concurrent validity. Findings suggest that the Pictorial Infant Communication Scale is a promising tool for measuring joint attention skills in preschool-aged children with autism spectrum disorder.

Commitment to classroom model philosophy and burnout symptoms among high fidelity teachers implementing preschool programs for children with autism spectrum disorders.

Teacher commitment to classroom model philosophy and burnout were explored in a sample of 53 teachers implementing three preschool models at high levels of fidelity for students with autism: Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Communication Handicapped Children (TEACCH); Learning Experiences and Alternative Program for Preschoolers and Their Parents (LEAP); and high quality special education programs (HQSEP's). Relative to the other groups, LEAP teachers reported significantly higher levels of commitment to LEAP philosophy while TEACCH teachers did not report significantly higher commitment levels to TEACCH philosophy. Teachers in HQSEP's reported similar levels of commitment to TEACCH and LEAP. Burnout was also low to moderate in this sample relative to normative data. Implications for school districts and teachers are discussed.

Self-referenced memory, social cognition, and symptom presentation in autism.

BACKGROUND: We examined performance on a self-referenced memory (SRM) task for higher-functioning children with autism (HFA) and a matched comparison group. SRM performance was examined in relation to symptom severity and social cognitive tests of mentalizing. METHOD: Sixty-two children (31 HFA, 31 comparison; 8-16 years) completed a SRM task in which they read a list of words and decided whether the word described something about them, something about Harry Potter, or contained a certain number of letters. They then identified words that were familiar from a longer list. Dependent measures were memory performance (d') in each of the three encoding conditions as well as a self-memory bias score (d' self-d' other). Children completed The Strange Stories Task and The Children's Eyes Test as measures of social cognition. Parents completed the SCQ and ASSQ as measures of symptom severity. RESULTS: Children in the comparison sample showed the standard SRM effect in which they recognized significantly more self-referenced words relative to words in the other-referenced and letter conditions. In contrast, HFA children showed comparable rates of recognition for self- and other-referenced words. For all children, SRM performance improved with age and enhanced SRM performance was related to lower levels of social problems. These associations were not accounted for by performance on the mentalizing tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Children with HFA did not show the standard enhanced processing of self- vs. other-relevant information. Individual differences in the tendency to preferentially process self-relevant information may be associated with social cognitive processes that serve to modify the expression of social symptoms in children with autism.

Temperament as a predictor of symptomotology and adaptive functioning in adolescents with high-functioning autism.

Variation in temperament is characteristic of all people but is rarely studied as a predictor of individual differences among individuals with autism. Relative to a matched comparison sample, adolescents with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) reported lower levels of Surgency and higher levels of Negative Affectivity. Variability in temperament predicted symptomotology, social skills, and social-emotional outcomes differently for individuals with HFA than for the comparison sample. This study is unique in that temperament was measured by self-report, while all outcome measures were reported by parents. The broader implications of this study suggest that by identifying individual variability in constructs, such as temperament, that may influence adaptive functioning, interventions may be developed to target these constructs and increase the likelihood that individuals with HFA will achieve more adaptive life outcomes.

The Modifier Model of Autism and Social Development in Higher Functioning Children.

The study of phenotypic variability in social impairments and comorbid emotional disorders in autism is important because it provides information on phenotypic differences that currently complicate diagnosis, research, and treatment of this disorder. Currently, though, relatively little is known about the processes that contribute to individual differences in social impairments and comorbidity in autism. In this paper, we present a model that suggests modifier processes (MPs), which are not necessarily specific to the syndrome refractor alter the expression of autism and contribute to fundamental behavioral and psychological differences in children diagnosed with this disorder. One MPs involves the somewhat surprising tendency of some children with higher functioning autism (HFA) to make attributions about other peoples thoughts, although they have social cognitive deficits Just as in other children, the attributions of children with HFA are linked to some of their behavioral problems Another MP involves the influence of differences in motivation associated with the behavioral activation and inhibition systems that can be assessed with measures of anterior EEG asymmetry. This dimension of motivation may be linked to how active but inappropriate and withdrawn children with HFA may appear. Third, differences in the self-monitoring of errors among children with HFA appear to be related to individual differences in IQ and social symptom severity in these children. The possible role of these MPs in diagnostic subgroups and differences in treatment responses among children with HFA are discussed. In addition, the role of MPs in understanding the effects associated with specific genetic functions in autism, such as those associated with the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR), is discussed. A conclusion of this paper is that the varied expression of autism may require that we understand how autism interacts with other non-syndrome-specific processes that are related to individual differences in all people.