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Empathy and Autism: Establishing the Structure and Different Manifestations of Empathy in Autistic Individuals Using the Perth Empathy ScaleThere is a common mischaracterisation that autistic individuals have reduced or absent empathy. Measurement issues may have influenced existing findings on the relationships between autism and empathy, and the structure of the empathy construct in autism remains unclear.
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Investigating Parental Observations of Early Autism Development in Simplex and Multiplex FamiliesPast research has highlighted the importance of early identification of developmental differences to improve targeted access to early interventions or supports. As such, it is of particular importance in the context of children at elevated likelihood of autism (such as where an older sibling has a diagnosis of autism), to better understand when and which early concerns are important as predictors of which children will benefit from pre-diagnostic supports.
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Arcuate fasciculus and pre-reading language development in children with prenatal alcohol exposurePrenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) contributes to widespread neurodevelopmental challenges, including reading, and has been associated with altered white matter. Here, we aimed to investigate whether arcuate fasciculus development is associated with pre-reading language skills in young children with PAE.
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Maternal Serum Vitamin D Levels During Pregnancy and Offspring Neurocognitive DevelopmentNew research links poor language to lack of Vitamin D in womb.
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Where were those rabbits? A new paradigm to determine cerebral lateralisation of visuospatial memory function in childrenIn the majority of people, functional differences are observed between the two cerebral hemispheres: language production is typically subserved by the left...
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CNTNAP2 variants affect early language development in the general populationWe tested the hypothesis that these CNTNAP2 variants affect communicative behavior, measured at 2 years of age in a large epidemiological sample...
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Inner speech impairment in children with autism is associated with greater nonverbal than verbal skillsWe present a new analysis of Whitehouse, Maybery, and Durkin's (2006, Experiment 3) data on inner speech in children with autism (CWA).

People
Andrew WhitehouseDeputy Director (Research); Angela Wright Bennett Professor of Autism Research at The Kids Research Institute Australia; Director, CliniKids
Research
A GWAS for grip strength in cohorts of children-Advantages of analysing young participants for this traitGrip strength is a proxy measure for muscular strength and a predictor for bone fracture risk among other diseases. Previous genome-wide association studies have been conducted in large cohorts of adults focusing on scores collected for the dominant hand, therefore increasing the likelihood of confounding effects by environmental factors.