Intensive exposure to narrative in story books as a possibly effective treatment of social perspective-taking in schoolchildren with autism.

One of the major characteristics of autism is impairment of communication and socialization. While such impairment per se has been well documented, research into effective interventions for children with this developmental disorder is still limited. Here we present preliminary evidence for the possibility of improvement of the capability of social perspective-taking in schoolchildren with autism by having intensive experience with narrative, in which they were exposed to narrative in story books read by their parents over a consecutive 5- to 6-day-period. When their capability was evaluated on the basis of a conventional role-taking task, the mean score tended to increase after the exposure as compared to before the exposure, whereas such a change was not recorded in children who did not experience such exposure. These effects were confirmed when the children were retested 4 months later. Although preliminary, the current study represents a step toward the development of more effective social perspective-taking interventions for children with autism.

Beyond disposition: the processing consequences of explicit and implicit invocations of empathy.

People often report empathizing with the trials and tribulations of others. While some accounts characterize empathy as a general tendency that individuals possess to differing degrees, an alternative, understudied view is that empathy emerges out of similarity-driven matches between potential targets and empathizers. The current project examines whether these matches, even when not explicitly identified, influence experiences of empathy, and whether that empathy has consequences for comprehension experiences. In two experiments, participants read stories describing protagonists as highly extraverted, highly neurotic, or neither; participants' personalities were also measured along these dimensions. Personality scores predicted participants' self-reported empathy for story protagonists, over and above measures of general empathy. Similarity between readers and protagonists also enhanced more subtle evaluations of the events befalling empathic targets. The effects of empathy have important implications for mental simulation, the motivated pursuit of knowledge, and persuasion.

[Effects of repetition and dual-task on output monitoring errors].

We investigated output-monitoring errors in a modified source-monitoring paradigm. Unlike the traditional paradigm that involves two phases, learning and monitoring, the modified paradigm involves three phases, learning, enactment, and monitoring. Three experiments produced two major findings. First, compared with the traditional paradigm, the modified paradigm produced fewer monitoring errors. Second, performing a dual-task during the enactment phase increased monitoring errors for the items that participants repeatedly enacted during the learning phase. In contrast, performing a dual-task during the learning phase did not influence monitoring errors. It only decreased the number of items that were enacted during the enactment phase. We concluded that monitoring errors are more likely to occur (a) when the modality of items matches between the learning and enactment phases (i.e., items are enacted during both phases), and (b) when a dual-task increases processing demands during the enactment phase.