Response to early intervention programs in autism is variable. However, the factors associated with positive versus poor treatment outcomes remain unknown. Hence the issue of which intervention/s should be chosen for an individual child remains a common dilemma. We argue that lack of knowledge on “what works for whom and why” in autism reflects a number of issues in current approaches to outcomes research, and we provide recommendations to address these limitations. These include: a theory-driven selection of putative predictors; the inclusion of proximal measures that are directly relevant to the learning mechanisms demanded by the specific educational strategies; the consideration of family characteristics. Moreover, all data on associations between predictor and outcome variables should be reported in treatment studies.

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There is a paucity of studies that have looked at factors associated with responsiveness to interventions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We investigated learning profiles associated with response to the early start Denver model delivered in a group setting. Our preliminary results from 21 preschool children with an ASD aged 2- to 5-years suggest that the children with more advanced skills in functional use of objects, goal understanding and imitation made the best developmental gains after 1 year of treatment. Cognitive abilities, social attention, intensity of the treatment and chronological age were not associated with treatment gains.

There is widespread belief that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are "emotionally detached" from others. This comprehensive review examines the empirical evidence for this assumption, addressing three critical questions: (1) Are emotion-processing impairments universal in ASD? (2) Are they specific, or can they be explained by deficits in other domains? (3) Is the emotion processing profile seen in ASD unique to these conditions? Upon review of the literature (over 200 studies), we conclude that: (1) emotion-processing impairments might not be universal in ASD, as suggested by variability across participants and across emotion-processing tasks; (2) emotion-processing impairments might not be specific to ASD, as domain-general processes appear to account for some of these impairments; and (3) the specific pattern of emotion-processing strengths and weaknesses observed in ASD, involving difficulties with processing social versus non-social, and complex versus simple emotional information (with impairments more consistently reported on implicit than explicit emotion-processing tasks), appears to be unique to ASD. The emotion-processing profile observed in ASD might be best understood as resulting from heterogeneous vulnerabilities in different components of an "emotional communication system" that, in typical development, emerges from the interplay between domain-general cognitive, social and affective processes.

The Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) is an intervention program recommended for pre-schoolers with autism ages 12-48 months. The rationale for this recommendation is the potential for intervention to affect developmental trajectories during early sensitive periods. We investigated outcomes of 32 children aged 18-48 months and 28 children aged 48-62 months receiving the ESDM for one year (approximately 20 h per week). Younger children achieved superior verbal DQ gains compared to their older counterparts. There were no group differences with respect to non-verbal DQ and adaptive behavior (with both age-groups undergoing significant change), or ASD severity (with neither age-group showing improvements on the ADOS). The association between verbal DQ gains and age at intake was moderated by baseline verbal level.