The Co-Regulation of Emotions Between Mothers and their Children with Autism

Thirty-four toddlers with autism and their mothers participated in an early intervention targeting joint engagement. Across the 24 intervention sessions, any significant distress episode in the child was coded for emotion regulation outcomes including child negativity, child emotion self-regulation, and mother emotion co-regulation. Results revealed that emotion regulation strategies by both mother and child were employed during distress episodes. An effect of intervention was found such that children decreased their expression of negativity across the intervention and mothers increased their emotional and motivational scaffolding. The results of this study indicate a positive effect of an intervention targeting joint engagement on emotion co-regulation outcomes

An experimental investigation of social-cognitive abilities in infants with autism: Clinical implications

Competing theoretical accounts of psychopathological development in individuals with autism emphasize the role of different infant social, cognitive and affective factors, including affective responsivity, pretend play, joint attention, and imitation. However, due to the fact that autism is rarely diagnosed before the age of 3, until now these abilities have only been studied with school-age children, adolescents, or young adults with autism. Taking advantage of a new prospective screening instrument for autism in infancy (Baron-Cohen et al., 1996), the present study compared the performance of 20-month-old infants with autism and pervasive developmental disorder to that of children with developmental delay without autism on experimental tasks of empathic response, pretend and functional play, joint attention and requesting behaviors, and imitation. The 20-month-old infants with autism failed to use social gaze declarativeiy in the joint attention task, they showed poor emphatic response, fewer imitated modelled actions on objects, and none produced spontaneous pretend play. Surprisingly, the infants with pervasive developmental disorder did not perform significantly differently from the infants with developmental delay without autism on any of the measures. The identification of autism-specific impairments in early social cognitive abilities may have important clinical implications, for the early diagnosis of the disorder and for the setting of goals and monitoring of progress in early intervention programs