The early social and communicative development of very young siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the focus of the current study. Three groups of children were included: (1) young children diagnosed with ASD, (2) younger siblings in families with a somewhat older child with ASD, and (3) young typically developing children. All children participated in a videotaped, struct...

Over the past decades, health communication has become central to public health research and practice. There is a growing consensus that theoretical thinking about the communicative aspects inherent to our efforts to promote health and to protect the public can, for instance, guide the development and implementation of successful health campaigns and social marketing initiatives; aid the dissem...

To the motion pictures that shape our sense of good, right and useful. Abstract Since the inception of AI research, great strides have been made towards achieving the goal of extending natural language conversation as a medium of interaction with machines. Today, we find many Conversational Agents (CAs) situated in various aspects of our everyday life such as information access, education and e...

Operationalizing mediated presence: Initial steps toward a measure of the construct This paper reports on an exploratory project to investigate mediated presence, a construct defined as the extent to which participants in a virtual environment perceive other participants in that environment as real, immediate or salient. Development and initial testing of a prompt designed to consistently diffe...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is defined behaviorally by severe deficiencies in reciprocal social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and restricted interests. The amygdala is involved in the regulation of social behaviors and may be an important site of pathology for the social dysfunction seen in autism. This review focuses on lesion, postmortem, and neuroimaging s...

Over 70 years since the first description of the disease, disrupted social behavior remains a core clinical feature of autistic spectrum disorder. The complex etiology of the disorder portends the need for a better understanding of the brain mechanisms that enable social behaviors, particularly those that are relevant to autism which is characterized by a failure to develop peer relationships, ...

Background: Measuring the attention level of children during social interactions can assist with the identification of developmental delays such as those present in people diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Although research has shown that physiological measures map onto observable behavior in the context of attention, this has rarely been studied in young children during live social inte...

The effectiveness of a 10-week group music therapy program for marginalized parents and their children aged 0-5 years was examined. Musical activities were used to promote positive parent-child relationships and children's behavioral, communicative and social development. Participants were 358 parents and children from families facing social disadvantage, young parents or parents of a child wit...

Autism is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by 1) aberrant reciprocal social interactions, 2) deficits in social communication, and 3) repetitive, stereotyped patterns of behaviors, along with narrow restricted interests. Designing mouse behavioral assays with face validity to the three core symptoms of autism in humans is a daunting challenge for behavioral neuroscientists. M...