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Biomedical subjects

T Charman

Publications and source records attributed to T Charman.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1997

Infants with autism: an investigation of empathy, pretend play, joint attention, and imitation.

Systematic studies of infants with autism have not been previously carried out. Taking advantage of a new prospective screening instrument for autism in infancy (S. Baron-Cohen et al., 1996), the present study found that, compared with developmentally delayed and normally developing children, 20-month-old children with autism were specifically impaired on some aspects of empathy, joint attention, and imitation. Infants with autism failed to use social gaze in the empathy and joint attention tasks. Both the infants with autism and the infants with developmental delay demonstrated functional play, but very few participants in either group produced spontaneous pretend play. In the developmental delay group, but not the autism group, pretend play was shown following prompting. The implications of these findings for developmental accounts of autism and for the early diagnosis of the disorder are discussed.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1997

Reliability of theory of mind task performance by individuals with a learning disability: a research note.

The aim of the present study was to test the reliability of theory of mind task performance by individuals with a learning disability. Across a series of three false belief tasks and two belief-desire reasoning tasks reliability was moderate--although it was no lower than has been found over a period of 3 weeks in normally developing children. The overall level of performance on the tasks was also only moderate, with approximately half the subjects passing on any one false belief task, and one quarter on any one belief-desire reasoning task. Reliable passers had higher VMA and NVMA than unreliable passers and subjects who failed. Given the important interpretations made regarding the representational skills of individuals on the basis of their responses in such experimental tasks, further work investigating the psychometric properties of the tasks is required with both typically and atypically developing individuals.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Self-reported depressed mood in Russian and U.K. schoolchildren. A research note.

Self-reported depressive symptoms were compared between two samples of schoolchildren-one in Russia and one in the U.K. Self-reported symptoms were significantly higher in the Russian sample on both the Child Depression Inventory (CDI) and the Depression Self-Rating Scale (DSRS). Age and gender effects were found for the Russian sample on the DSRS but not the CDI, with younger children and girls scoring more highly. The possible explanations for the elevated self-report of depressive symptoms in the Russian sample are considered.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Psychological markers in the detection of autism in infancy in a large population.

BACKGROUND: Investigation to see if there are key psychological risk indicators for autism in a random population study of children at 18 months of age; and to assess how well these discriminate children who receive a diagnosis of autism from other forms of developmental delay. METHOD: Sixteen thousand children in the southeast of England were screened for autism by their health visitor or GP, during their routine 18-month-old developmental check-up, using the CHAT (Checklist for Autism in Toddlers). From a previous high-risk study we predicted that children at 18 months of age who failed three items ('protodeclarative pointing', 'gaze-monitoring', and 'pretend play') would be at risk for receiving a diagnosis of autism. From other evidence, we further predicted that those 18-month-olds who failed one or two of the key items (either pretend play, or protodeclarative pointing and pretend play) would be at risk for developmental delay without autism. RESULTS: Twelve children out of the total population of 16,000 consistently failed the three key items. Of these, 10 (83.3%) received a diagnosis of autism. Thus, the false positive rate was 16.6% (2 out of 12 cases), and even these 2 cases were not normal. When the 10 children with autism were reassessed at 3.5 years of age, their diagnosis remained the same. Thus the false positive rate among the cases diagnosed with autism was zero. In contrast, of 22 children who consistently failed either protodeclarative pointing and/or pretend play, none received a diagnosis of autism, but 15 (68.2%) received a diagnosis of language delay. CONCLUSIONS: Consistent failure of the three key items from the CHAT at 18 months of age carries an 83.3% risk of autism; and this pattern of risk indicator is specific to autism when compared to other forms of developmental delay.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1994

The stability of depressed mood in young adolescents: a school-based survey.

To test the stability of self-reported depressed mood in a school-based sample of young adolescents, 268 schoolchildren completed two self-rating scales measuring depressed mood, the Depression Self Rating Scale and the Child Depression Inventory, at three timepoints over a period of 6 months. Depressed mood in the sample, as measured across the whole range of the scales, was reasonably stable. A subgroup of children was identified for whom the mean scores of both scales at all three timepoints was close to, or above, the cut-off points, representing a stably depressed mood similar to that found in clinical populations. The present findings indicate that depressed mood within a section of the general child population may be more stable and less transient than previously thought.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1992

Understanding drawings and beliefs: a further test of the metarepresentation theory of autism: a research note.

Leslie (1987, Psychological Review, 94, 412-426) proposed that the "theory of mind" deficit in autism was the result of a metarepresentation impairment. Studies employing False Photograph or Belief tests have shown that in autism the deficit is restricted to representing mental representations, and does not extend to representing pictorial representations. In this study, we tested this claim further using a False Drawing test. Subjects with autism performed at the same level as mentally handicapped or normal 4-year-old subjects on the False Drawing test, but significantly worse on the False Belief test. This confirmed the specificity of the deficit in autism.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Behavioural and emotional features in Rett syndrome.

PURPOSE/METHOD: There is increasing agreement that many genetic disorders have characteristic behavioural phenotypes; that is genetic anomalies have specific effects on behaviour. In this paper the existing literature is reviewed with an aim to identify behavioural and emotional features that are candidates for Rett syndrome (RS) specific behaviours. RESULT/CONCLUSION: A number of behavioural and emotional features have been reported to be common in individuals with RS. These behaviours may constitute an RS-specific profile of behaviour or behavioural phenotype. Alternatively, these behaviours may simply reflect the multiple disabilities found in individuals with severe or profound cognitive impairment. The diagnostic criteria for Rett syndrome include a number of the behavioural features, such as hand stereotypies and breathing difficulties, although other behavioural features are not included.

Activities of Daily Living↗