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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. https://www.utdallas.edu/news/health-medicine/autism-social-interactions-2020/
A detailed thread about the study and a link to the paper can be found here (feel free to DM me your email address if you’d like a copy of the full paper for this study or any of our studies): https://twitter.com/noahsasson/status/1204746908599799808
Another paper published early in 2020 (it appeared a few months earlier online) showed that traditional standalone tasks of social cognition are less predictive of functional and social skills among autistic adults than commonly assumed in autism research. https://twitter.com/noahsasson/status/1162359253513973760
Next, @kmdebrabander led and published an innovative study about how well autistic and non-autistic adults can predict their own cognitive and social cognitive performance. https://twitter.com/noahsasson/status/1307664961125130241
Meanwhile, @DesiRJones was making huge strides highlighting how the woeful underrepresentation of Black scientists and Black autistic people within autism research affects cultural assumptions and clinical practice. https://twitter.com/DesiRJones/status/1311658778803286022
Desi also hosted this powerful round table about the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx autistic adults. https://twitter.com/desirjones/status/1324749549177577480
She then participated in this thoughtful podcast produced by @Spectrum about being Black in autism research. https://www.spectrumnews.org/features/multimedia/podcasts/what-its-like-to-be-a-black-autism-researcher/
Our lab then published a paper supporting the “double empathy theory” by @milton_damian showing that traditional measures and notions of social skill, social motivation, and social cognition have almost no relation to the real-world social interaction outcomes of autistic adults. https://twitter.com/noahsasson/status/1331454555809329153
My lab isn’t an island, though! We continue to pursue collaborations with wonderful colleagues around the country (and now internationally as well! @cjcrompton @SueReviews among others). For instance...
I was thrilled to be part of this incisive and righteous paper led by @KristenBott about avoiding ableist language when taking about and researching autism. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/aut.2020.0014?fbclid=IwAR2kokur4miUxHGtQ0vrEiT5D8Akoxy8k3-OlFcMTRttpo2pE-TGI_2uSQU&
I’m also so lucky to continue to work with @ClareHarropPhD and colleagues examining sex differences in social and non-social attention in autistic children. We have a series of papers on this topic. Here’s the latest that came@out this year: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aur.2245
We have several other papers coming out soon, including a really important (IMO) study led by @DesiRJones testing how well an autism acceptance “intervention” for non-autistic adults reduces explicit and implicit biases about autism. Stay tuned!
