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Emotions are embedded in culture and play a pivotal role in making friends and interacting with peers. To support the social participation of students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) it is essential to understand their emotional life in the context of ethnic and school cultures. We are particularly interested in how anxiety and loneliness are experienced in developing and maintaining friendships in the daily encounters of adolescents with ASD in the specific context of Japanese schools, because these emotions could serve either as facilitators or barriers to social interaction, depending on how individuals manage them. The present qualitative study investigated perceptions of emotions related to friendship in the everyday school life of 11 adolescents with ASD in Japan. Data were collected by means of semi-structured individual interviews, which revealed a wide range of motivations for socialization, limited future prospects to deepen friendships, robust self-awareness of one’s own social challenges, and conscious efforts to cope with these challenges. An inductive approach to data analysis resulted in four themes: social motivation, loneliness, anxiety, and distress. To our knowledge this is the first study to uncover the rich emotional life of adolescents with ASD in the context of their friendships in an Asian culture.

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Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and those with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) always show working memory deficits. However, research findings on the factors that affected the working memory in ASD and ADHD were inconsistent. Thus, we developed the present study to investigate the association of executive function (EF) with the visuospatial working memory (VSWM) in ASD and ADHD. Three groups of participants were examined: 21 children with ASD, 28 children with ADHD and 28 typically developing (TD) children as the controls. All participants completed two tests: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) and the Corsi Block Tapping Test for measuring EF and VSWM, respectively. The WCST included four domains: categories achieved (CA), perseverative errors (PE), failures to maintain set (FMS), and total errors (TE). The findings indicated that (1) the ASD group showed poorer performance in VSWM than the ADHD and TD groups; (2) for the ASD group, VSWM was positively correlated with CA, and was negatively correlated with PE and TE; (3) for the ADHD group, FMS showed a negative relationship with VSWM; and (4) TE predicted the performance of VSWM in ASD group, while FMS predicted VSWM in ADHD group. The study results suggested that VSWM was impaired in ASD but not in ADHD. Also, the EF domains were differently correlated with the VSWM performance in ASD and ADHD. Our study suggests that we should consider different intervention targets of working memory and EF contributions in improving the cognitive capacity of ASD and ADHD. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1148-1156. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: The present study compared the visuospatial working memory (VSWM) in three groups of children: autism (ASD), attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and typically developed children (TD). The ASD group showed poorer VSWM than the ADHD and TD groups. The total error of executive function predicted the performance of VSWM in ASD, while failures to maintain set predicted VSWM in ADHD . These findings suggested that we should consider the different working memory and executive function training targets to increase cognitive capacity of ASD and ADHD.

The current study investigated the differential attentive, emotional and behavioral responses to facial expressions in toddlers with autism (N = 37) and healthy controls (N = 40) using a task capturing visual attention, emotional response and joint attention behavior to facial expression. The findings showed that autistic children's performances were significantly worse than healthy children. These preliminary findings suggest that children with autism not only show less visual attention to facial expression than healthy children but also have impairments in social attention. A fine-grained analysis showed that children with autism, but not healthy children, showed abnormal emotional responses to the negative facial expressions. The results are discussed in terms of cognitive deficits in facial expression in young children of autism.