Social Skills
Overview
Children with ASDs experience substantial delays in the development of social skills. Examples of such skills include initiating interactions with others, the ability to attend to items or events with another person (joint attention), turn taking, empathy, and politeness. Deficits in social skills may further exacerbate the social, emotional, and cognitive development of children with autism. Despite this known risk few well established research-based practices exist for improving the social skills of children with autism. MCPER is currently conducting research aimed at developing and evaluating social skills interventions.
Links
For an example of recent research regarding social skills conducted at MCPER follow this link: