The evaluation of the development of young children had to consider the possible detection of neurodevelopmental disorders in particular autism spectrum disorders. When a child of 18 months has a developmental language delay or a defect in social contact, the hypothesis of autism must be considered through a clinical evaluation. We will point out some clinical guidelines and some early signs to...

Numerous studies investigated executive functioning (EF) problems in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) using laboratory EF tasks. As laboratory task performances often differ from real life observations, the current study focused on EF in everyday life of 118 children and adolescents with ASD (6-18 years). We investigated age-related and individual differences in EF problems as report...

We analyzed data from case groups of 538 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 163 with developmental delays (DD), and from 421 typically developing controls to assess associations with maternal influenza or fever during pregnancy. Exposure information was obtained by telephone interviews, and outcomes were clinically confirmed. Though neither ASD nor DD was associated with influenz...

The aim of the current study was to meta-analytically examine whether anxiety levels in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are elevated. A total of 83 articles were selected from a systematic literature search and were included in the meta-analyses. Results demonstrated that children with ASD had higher anxiety levels compared to typically developing children, and this difference inc...

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is indicated as an important transdiagnostic process variable in a range of anxiety disorders. Anxiety is very common in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This study aimed to develop a parent group based manualised treatment programme for young people with ASD, which focused on IU. An eight session programme was developed and then delivered to 11 par...

Parental separation is a risky traumatic experience for the child regardless of his age. To overcome this ordeal, sets up functional or adaptive mechanisms, enabling him to continue development; on contrary, giving rise emotional symptoms, behavioral disorders and / school sufferance. The expression suffering will depend several factors (the age child, level development, personality that parent...

this article investigates father's role in child and adolescent psychopathology. the role of mother has been studied extensively, but the father's role in child psychopathology has been studied much less and is limited to what has been done in the past few decades. this article reviews some of the studies regarding father's role in child and adolescent psychopathology, namely att...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether pre-school children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) interact differently with their peers with ASD compared to their typically developing (TD) peers, across three activities (free play, structured group time and semi-structured play) in an early intervention setting. METHODS We completed a series of non-experimental case studies involving 13 children with A...

PURPOSE To compare the results obtained in the Autism Behavior Checklist with those obtained in the Childhood Autism Rating Scale to identify and characterize children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. METHODS Participants were 28 children with psychiatric diagnosis within the autism spectrum that were enrolled in language therapy in a specialized service. These children were assessed according...

The ability of organisms to seamlessly ignore familiar, inconsequential stimuli improves their selective attention and response to salient features of the environment. Here, I propose that this fundamental but unexplained phenomenon substantially derives from the ability of any pattern of neural excitation to create an enhanced inhibitory (or "negative") image of itself through target-specific ...