Current Research

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Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University

This project is testing the effectiveness of a new questionnaire that has been developed to measure how children and young people with ASD experience the world. It is expected that the questionnaire will help people working with children and young people with ASD better understand how they are feeling.The lead researchers for this project are Dr. Jacqui Rogers, senior lecturer, Clinical Psychology, and Dr. Sarah Wigham, Research Associate, at Newcastle University.

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School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast

Temper outbursts are a common form of challenging behaviour shown by children with intellectual disabilities and/or autism spectrum disorders, and associated with negative outcomes. Many of the outbursts are triggered by changes to children’s routines or expectations. This project will pilot a caregiver led intervention aiming to reduce such outbursts by signalling changes; testing the feasibility of this approach for evaluation in a clinical trial. Participants will be 50-60 children with an intellectual disability/autism spectrum disorder (7-16 years), and their caregivers. A structured interview and questionnaire will select children who show most frequent temper outbursts following changes (n=35-40; Sample 1). In addition, 10-24 parents and 10-24 professionals who have/are working with children who show challenging behaviour will participate (Sample 2).

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School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol

Many people believe that children with ASD have difficulty recognising emotion from facial expressions. However the research evidence is very mixed, with some studies finding these difficulties do exist and others finding that they don’t. By running an online study using new platform that allows cognitive testing over the Internet http://www.xperiment.mobi, we hope to recruit 100 children with ASD to complete a sensitive measure of facial expression recognition. This measure includes low intensity facial expressions, which are more like the facial expressions that are encountered in real social interactions. Children will also complete measures of verbal and nonverbal ability in order to match them with typical developing children. Each of the three tasks takes around 20-30 minutes to complete. We would also ask parents to answer some questions about their children’s diagnostic history and complete the SCQ. The protocol for this study has been preregistered on the Open Science Framework and can be found here: https://osf.io/ufajp/

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Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE), Institute of Education, University of London

ASD-UK is supporting Dr Liz Pellicano (principal investigator), Dr Themis Karaminis and Ms Louise Neil to recruit children and young people on the autism spectrum aged between 6 and 14 years in the greater London area for this study.

The Medical Research Council has funded researchers at CRAE to find out more about why sensory symptoms, such as hyper sensitivity (e.g. an aversion to fluorescent lights), hyposensitivity (e.g. only perceiving things when they are really vivid) and unusual interest in sensory aspects of the environment (e.g. being drawn to spinning things) often occur in autism. Dr Liz Pellicano (the director of CRAE) and her collaborator at the University of Florence, Professor David Burr, have suggested that people with autism may rely more heavily on ‘the here and now’ rather than knowledge gained from previous experience, when processing sensory information. To test this possibility, researchers will be seeing children either at the Institute of Education or at home or at school to administer several tasks (fun computer games!) designed to find out more about children’s perceptual experiences. Parents will also be given questionnaires to fill in.

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