Studies on the role played by attachment attitudes among late adolescents who show Problematic Internet Use (PIU) are still lacking. Three self-report measures concerning attachment attitudes, childhood experiences of abuse, and Internet addiction were administered to 310 students (49 % males) aged 18-19 attending the last year of high school. Students who screened positive for PIU were more likely to be male and to have suffered childhood experiences of physical and sexual abuse; they also scored higher than the other participants on scales assessing anxious and avoidant attachment attitudes. A logistic regression showed that the classification of participants in the PIU group was predicted by male gender, having suffered from physical and sexual abuse in childhood, and preoccupation with relationships. Keeping constant the effects of gender and childhood experiences of abuse in the equation model, increasing values of preoccupation with relationships were reflected by an exponential growth in the probability curve for PIU classification. Findings of the study support the hypothesis that insecure attachment attitudes (particularly the preoccupation with relationships) are involved in the development of PIU among late adolescents.

Atypical responsivity to social rewards has been observed in young children with or at risk of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). These observations contributed to the hypothesis of reduced social motivation in ASD. In the current study we develop a novel task to test social reward preference using a tablet computer (iPad), where two differently coloured buttons were associated with a social and a nonsocial rewarding image respectively. 63 young children, aged 14–68 months, with and without a diagnosis of ASD took part in the study. The experimental sessions were also recorded on video, using an in-built webcam on the tablet as well as an external camera. Children with ASD were found to show a reduced relative preference for social rewards, indexed by a lower proportion of touches for the button associated with the social reward image. Greater social preference as measured using the tablet-based task was associated with increased use of social communicative behaviour such as eye contact with the experimenter and social smile in response to the social reward image. These results are consistent with earlier findings from eye-tracking studies, and provide novel empirical insights into atypical social reward responsivity in ASD.

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