The Social Aptitudes Scale: looking at both “ends” of the social functioning dimension

Abstract

Our results provide further validity to SAS and exemplify the potential of "bidirectional" scales to dimensional assessment, allowing a better understanding of variations that occur in the population and providing information for children with typical and atypical development.

Measuring strengths and weaknesses in dimensional psychiatry

“…Efforts such as the NIMH Research Domain Criteria Project have successfully drawn attention to the potential added value of dimensional characterizations that cut across the diagnostic boundaries specified by DSM and ICD (Insel et al., ). Yet the vast majority of questionnaires focused on mental health are limited in their ability to characterize variation among individuals beyond the symptomatic segment of the population (Axelrud et al., ; Greven et al., ). The E‐SWAN framework offers a viable alternative for improving our ability to differentiate individuals that are nonsymptomatic in a given domain.…”

“…However, the vast majority are based on detection of the presence of problematic behaviors and symptoms. Although useful from a clinical perspective, the tendency to focus on only ‘one end’ of the distribution (i.e., the pathologic trait range) limits the ability of such tools to distinguish individuals from one another in less symptomatic or nonaffected segments of the population (i.e., the distribution is truncated; Axelrud et al., ; Greven, Buitelaar, & Salum, ). This failure to consider differences in strengths among individuals is particularly problematic for psychiatric research, where efforts to model brain–behavior relationships are increasingly turning to broader community and transdiagnostic samples (Insel et al., ).…”

A longitudinal resource for studying connectome development and its psychiatric associations during childhood

“…Although reflective of the practices of the larger field, the reliance on measures that assess only the presence of deficits can be limiting as they fail to differentiate behaviors among unaffected individuals. Recent efforts by our team 53 and others [54][55][56][57] have called this practice into question as it is akin to grouping all with an IQ above 100 together. The distributions resulting from such tools tend to be truncated and thus suboptimal for dimensional analysis in genetics, imaging, and epidemiologic studies.…”

Balancing Strengths and Weaknesses in Dimensional Psychiatry

“…Efforts such as the NIMH Research Domain Criteria Project have successfully drawn attention to the potential added value of dimensional characterizations that cut across the diagnostic boundaries specified by DSM and ICD 3 . Yet the vast majority of questionnaires focused on mental health are limited in their ability to characterize variation among individuals beyond the symptomatic segment of the population1,2 .As demonstrated in the present work, the E-SWAN framework offers a viable alternative for improving our ability to differentiate individuals that are non-symptomatic in a given domain. Itdoes so without losing track of the clinical significance of identifying a pathological range of the trait (which is used as the departure point for characterizing the trait).…”

“…However, the vast majority are based on detection of the presence of problematic behaviors and symptoms. Although useful from a clinical perspective, the tendency to focus on only 'one end' of the distribution (i.e., the pathologic trait range) limits the ability of such tools to distinguish individuals from one another in less symptomatic or non-affected segments of the population (i.e., the distribution is truncated) 1,2 . This failure to consider differences in strengths among individuals is particularly problematic for psychiatric research, where efforts to model brainbehavior relationships are increasingly turning to broader community and transdiagnostic samples 3 .…”