LEGO therapy and the Social Use of Language Programme (SULP) were evaluated as social skills interventions for 6-11 year olds with high functioning autism and Asperger Syndrome. Children were matched on CA, IQ, and autistic symptoms before being randomly assigned to LEGO or SULP. Therapy occurred for 1 h/week over 18 weeks. A no-intervention control group was also assessed. Results showed that ...

The process of political socialisation of adolescents includes more than the acquisition of knowledge about society, citizenship and the political system. In a democracy, citizens are expected to participate actively in the political process. Active participation, however, requires citizens to believe in their own ability to influence the course of politics, in other words, to feel politically ...

We investigate the impact of computer-mediated interaction on person perception. In particular, we study how traits important for socialisation and collaboration—Extraversion and Neuroticism—can be detected from the text of an e-mail communication. We have previously shown how Extraversion influences people’s language production in electronic communication, in broadly intuitive ways. Here, we b...

This paper presents an analysis of different types of pragmatic failure in the interactional behaviour of the ‘autistic’ protagonists of three recent novels. Three main types of pragmatic failure occur across all three novels: problems with informativeness and relevance in conversational contributions; problems with face management resulting in unintentional impolite behaviours; and problems wi...

IT support for knowledge management that builds on rather standard information systems architectures, e.g. a Web server with underlying database technologies, has proven beneficial in many situations where knowledge processes supported in this way were comparatively rigid and where the value of knowledge could be reasonably easily be assessed. However, these assumptions do not hold for less rig...