Social Communication

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Social Communication

Basic Characteristics

• Description

Social Communication is extremely impaired in people with ASD. People with ASD may display poor eye contact, difficulty understanding and using appropriate social gestures, difficulty in interpreting facial expressions, or inappropriate facial expressions. Additionally, many have poorly developed empathy and a lack of reciprocity. However, many people with ASD express that they would like to have friends, but do not know how to make friends and retain them. Additionally, nonverbal and verbal communication is usually impaired at least slightly in those with ASD. There is large variability in language abilities in those with ASD. Some may have some language capabilities, and some may never have the ability to communicate verbally. Others may have completely normal vocabularies. Those with verbal skills could still have trouble initiating and sustaining conversations outside of their own interests. Additionally, children with autism usually have trouble understanding and integrating abstract ideas.¹

• Tests to Measure Joint Attention

• Intervention

Treatments have been developed to improve Joint Attention in children with a variable amount of success. In two recent studies (Kasari et al., 2006; Kasari et al. 2008), it was found that improvements in child joint attention initiations and joint engagement with mothers were able to significantly predict the child's language abilities a year later. Furthermore, it was found that the treatment was most effective for children who were initially nonverbal (speaking less than five spoken words).

Other potential factors that could affect the successfulness of a treatment could be ethnic and economic conditions. However, research incorporating subjects of various economic and ethnic backgrounds have been few and more needs to be done in order to see if these factors are actual moderators of treatment success.

• References

1. Bertoglio, Kiah and Robert L. Hendren. New Developments in Autism. PMID 19248913

Related Information

• Joint Attention and Autism Spectrum Disorder

• Intervention

• Tasks or Tests to Measure Joint Attention

• Intervention

• Indicators (dependent variables, conditions, or contrasts; measurement variables used for analysis) associated with this construct (vote or nominate by editing this page):

• Closely related pages (vote or nominate related pages by editing this page):

• CNP Level (What's this?)
  • Cognitive Concept

External Resources

• Links out:
  • Wikipedia: Joint Attention
  • Google: Joint Attention
  • PubMed: Joint Attention
  • -ucla cognitive atlas- (coming soon!)

• Database links