Abstract
Early impaired response to social partners’ distress may negatively impact subsequent social development. Identifying factors contributing to successful responding may inform assessment and intervention. This study explores how: (1) social impairment, and (2) partner familiarity relate to response to partners’ distress. Infants with and without older siblings with ASD were assessed at 12 (n = 29) and 15 (n = 35) months for social impairment markers, and responses to mother and experimenter each feigning distress. Infants with more social impairment showed less attention and affect at 15, but not 12 months. Infants attended more to the unfamiliar person, but exhibited greater affect toward the familiar person at 12 months. Results revealed social impairment and familiarity were separately related to infant response to partners’ distress.
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Notes
To further examine the possible influence of the HR infants who did not enroll in the study until 15 months (n = 6), the data for these infants were removed and the analyses were re-run. The results remained consistent with the optimal models of ASD Severity when these infants were removed.
See Online Resource 1 for a table of means and standard deviations of the ASD Markers calculated at 12 and 15 months for the entire sample, as well as for the HR and LR groups. As expected based on previous research (Gammer et al. 2015), t-tests showed the HR infants had significantly more ASD Markers than the LR infants at 12 (t(39.3) = 3.57, p < .001) and 15 months (t(62.6) = 5.22, p < .001), as well as significantly greater ASD Severity at 12 (t(40.) = 3.62, p < .001) and 15 months (t(61.02) = 5.18, p < .001).
See Online Resource 2 for the distribution of ASD Markers within the HR and LR groups.
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This study was funded by Institutional Research Funds provided by the authors’ university.
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Alexandra C. Dowd conceived of the theoretical approach to examining the data, was the gold-standard reliability coder, processed the experimental data, performed the analyses, interpreted the findings, designed the figures and tables, and took the lead in writing the manuscript. Dr. A. Rebecca Neal-Beevers supervised the project, provided critical feedback on the theoretical approach, aided in interpreting the results, and helped author and shape the manuscript. Kassandra Martinez helped identify nuances for the behavioral coding scheme for response to distress, behaviorally coded response to distress after reliability was established, drafted the initial methods section, and reviewed the manuscript. Dr. Bridget C. Davidson designed and directed the larger research project that this project extracts from, and she performed the experiments. Dr. J. Gregory Hixon contributed to the design of the analytic approach, supervised the analyses, and provided feedback on the manuscript.
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Dowd, A.C., Martinez, K., Davidson, B.C. et al. Response to Distress Varies by Social Impairment and Familiarity in Infants at Risk for Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 3885–3898 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3653-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3653-3