Developmental Profile of Social Communication: Findings in Typical Developing Greek Children.

OBJECTIVES: The Developmental Profile of Social Communication (DPSC) is based on the communication and language development in children with social communication difficulties. DPSC facilitates understanding of the challenges these children face in social interaction, communication, and linguistic development. It utilizes clinician and parent responses to build the developmental profiles of individuals. The profile allows clinicians to determine the therapeutic goals for improved cooperation and communication in various contexts. In addition, it provides insight into the parents' perspective. The aim of this study is to present the preliminary results of the DPSC in typically developing Greek children. METHODS: The DPSC, a 112-item questionnaire, was administered to 357 parents of typically developing children aged 2-7.5 years using a 3-scale rating of answers. It was applied electronically via Google forms, and parents were able to ask for clarification on questions. All answers were categorized and then analyzed under independent variables. RESULTS: Descriptive and hypothesis testing were used to summarize participant characteristics and performance. Findings suggest that children >7.5 years tended to develop most of the rated skills of DPSC adequately. CONCLUSIONS: It was determined that the DPSC questionnaire is an easily administered tool that enables the evaluation of the social communication abilities of children of different ages.

Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Children's Version): a comparison study between children with typical development, children with high-functioning autism and typically developed adults.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: One of psychology's challenges is to develop and evaluate sensitive tests in the area of social cognition. Yet, there are few available scales that can measure mild deficits in social understanding, especially for typically developing (TD) populations. The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (children's version) was translated and adapted for use in the Greek language [RMET-G (child)]. The aim of this study was to examine in the Greek language the qualitative and quantitative differences between TD youngsters and those with high-functioning autism (HFA), as well as the difference between TD children and TD adults. METHODS: An interview-based psychometric study was conducted. Participants completed the RMET-G (child), constituting 3 groups: TD children older than 8 years, children with HFA and TD adults. RESULTS: 103 participants completed the study. The results demonstrated that TD adults scored slightly higher than TD children, and children with HFA scored lower than their TD peers. Children with HFA, however, were able to recognize many of the pictures shown in the test. CONCLUSION: The results of this study, which were the first to be conducted in the Greek language, confirm findings of other studies in the literature conducted with the RMET in the English language.