Very proud of @kmdebrabander for her #INSAR2021 poster “Autistic Adults Accurately Detect Social Disinterest in their Conversation Partners when Non-Autistic Adults Do Not”. A🧵about our findings, which pretty clearly don’t align with a social cognitive deficit model of autism! Data in this study are drawn from an earlier project by Kerrianne Morrison who found (among other things) that non-autistic adults-- but not autistic ones-- express low social interest for future interaction with autistic people they just met.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

NEW PAPER led by @DesiRJones: non-autistic (NA) adults often hold negative implicit & explicit biases about autism that create barriers for autistic people and harm their personal & professional well-being. We wanted to see if we could reduce them. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13… Our rationale: putting the onus exclusively on autistic people to “normalize”, mask their autism to fit in, and/or disclose their diagnosis hoping that it’ll be beneficial absolves NA people from working towards greater acceptance and accommodation.

Before we get too far into 2021, I thought I’d write a thread recapping some of the research that came out of my lab in 2020. Most of this work was led by my talented team of graduate students, Kerrianne Morrison, @kmdebrabander, and @DesiRJones. Back in January, a news story was published about Kerrianne’s study showing improved social interaction outcomes for autistic adults when paired with another autistic partner. utdallas.edu/news/health-me…

A thread about our new open-access paper, just out today. We tested how well standardized measures of social cognition, social skill, and social motivation predict real-world social interaction outcomes for autistic and non-autistic (NA) adults. frontiersin.org/articles/10.33… First some background: a deficit model of autism assumes that autistic adults often struggle in interactions w/ NA adults because they have poor or less normative social abilities. Surprisingly this assumption is rarely tested. Seems important to do!

In our new paper out today, autistic adults held a “get to know you” conversation with an unfamiliar autistic or typically-developing (TD) person. We were curious: would social interaction outcomes differ when their partner was also autistic? THREAD journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… Most studies attempting to understand social disability in autism focus exclusively on individual characteristics, like social cognitive ability (e.g., theory of mind). This presumes that social interaction difficulties in autism are driven solely by the autistic person.

Do first impressions of autistic adults differ between neurotypical (NT) and autistic observers? Our new paper led by @kmdebrabander (now out at #AutisminAdulthood) addresses this question & is full of interesting findings. Here are some of the highlights. liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/au… Our lab has shown that NTs often form negative 1st impressions of autistic adults and are reluctant to interact with them, which creates barriers to social inclusion. Thankfully, these impressions improve when NTs have high autism knowledge or are made aware of their diagnosis.

We have a new paper! Led by my student Kerrianne Morrison (w/@kmdebrabander & @DanielFaso) we find that impressions of autistic adults made by neurotypicals (NT) are driven more by characteristics of the NT perceiver than by those of the ASD target. THREAD journals.sagepub.com/eprint/3B4RadK… Our group (along with Ruth Grossman and @DanKennedyIU ) had previously found that NTs rate autistic adults less favorably than NT controls on many traits, and are less inclined to want to subsequently interact with them. 2/ nature.com/articles/srep4…