Connie Kasari | |
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Occupation(s) | Professor of Professor of Psychological Studies in Education and Psychiatry |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Peabody College Oregon State University |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of California,Los Angeles |
Connie Kasari is an expert on autism spectrum disorder and a founding member of the Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART) at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA). Kasari is Professor of Psychological Studies in Education at UCLA and Professor of Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is the leader of the Autism Intervention Research Network for Behavioral Health,a nine-institution research consortium. [1]
Kasari received the Harold A. and Lois Haytin Award in 2017 in recognition of her community partnered participatory research in South Los Angeles and at the UCLA Lab School. [2] Kasari's work with various organizations in South Los Angeles has focused on increasing awareness and knowledge about autism;her work at the UCLA Lab School aims to improve instructional methods for "complex learners" who benefit from curricular modifications.
Kasari completed a Bachelor of Science degree at Oregon State University. After completing a Masters of Arts at Peabody College,she went on to obtain a PhD in psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1985. Her dissertation titled Mother-handicapped infant interactions:A comparison of caregiver and infant characteristics [3] and other early research,conducted in collaboration with John Filler,focused on young children with severe disabilities that impacted their motor functioning and interactions with caregivers. [4]
Kasari was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA prior to joining UCLA faculty in 1990. [5] As a post doctoral fellow,she began a long-standing collaborative program of research with Marian Sigman,Peter C. Mundy,and Nurit Yirmiya,focusing on social interaction,joint attention,and affect expression in children with autism,Down syndrome,and other development disabilities. [6] [7] [8]
Kasari has served as the Principal Investigator of several Autism Center of Excellence Grants from the National Institutes of Health awarded to UCLA. [9] The grants have supported multi-site randomized controlled trials to support communicative development in minimally verbal autistic children. [10]
Kasari's research focuses on targeted interventions for early social communication development in at-risk infants,toddlers,and preschoolers with autism,and peer relationships for school-aged children with autism. Kasari has led several randomized controlled trials of therapeutic interventions for children with autism. Her team developed Joint Attention Symbolic Play Engagement and Regulation (JASPER) therapy as an evidence-based treatment for autistic children. [11] [12] JASPER aims to improve joint engagement,social communication,and emotion regulation,and decrease child negativity,while improving parental co-regulation strategies. [13] More recent work tested a parental responsiveness intervention for toddlers at high risk for autism using a randomized control design. [14] This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of a parent-mediated intervention to increase parental responsiveness and the impact of the intervention on the children's cognitive and language skills. Although the intervention was effective in increasing parental responsiveness to their children,it did not lead to improvements in the children's joint attention and communication skills after one year,relative to the control group.
Baby sign language is the use of manual signing allowing infants and toddlers to communicate emotions,desires,and objects prior to spoken language development. With guidance and encouragement,signing develops from a natural stage in infant development known as gesture. These gestures are taught in conjunction with speech to hearing children,and are not the same as a sign language. Some common benefits that have been found through the use of baby sign programs include an increased parent-child bond and communication,decreased frustration,and improved self-esteem for both the parent and child. Researchers have found that baby sign neither benefits nor harms the language development of infants. Promotional products and ease of information access have increased the attention that baby sign receives,making it pertinent that caregivers become educated before making the decision to use baby sign.
Attachment disorder is a broad term intended to describe disorders of mood,behavior,and social relationships arising from unavailability of normal socializing care and attention from primary caregiving figures in early childhood. Such a failure would result from unusual early experiences of neglect,abuse,abrupt separation from caregivers between three months and three years of age,frequent change or excessive numbers of caregivers,or lack of caregiver responsiveness to child communicative efforts resulting in a lack of basic trust. A problematic history of social relationships occurring after about age three may be distressing to a child,but does not result in attachment disorder.
Reactive attachment disorder (RAD) is described in clinical literature as a severe disorder that can affect children,although these issues do occasionally persist into adulthood. RAD is characterized by markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate ways of relating socially in most contexts. It can take the form of a persistent failure to initiate or respond to most social interactions in a developmentally appropriate way—known as the "inhibited form". In the DSM-5,the "disinhibited form" is considered a separate diagnosis named "disinhibited attachment disorder".
An attachment theory is a psychological,evolutionary,and ethological theory concerning relationships between humans. The most important tenet is that young children need to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for normal social and emotional development. The theory was formulated by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby (1907–1990).
Ole Ivar Løvaas was a Norwegian-American clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California,Los Angeles. He is most well known for his research on what is now called applied behavior analysis (ABA) to teach autistic children through prompts,modeling,and positive reinforcement. The therapy is also noted for its use of aversives (punishment) to reduce undesired behavior,however these are now used less commonly than in the past.
The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) is a standardized diagnostic test for assessing autism spectrum disorder. The protocol consists of a series of structured and semi-structured tasks that involve social interaction between the examiner and the person under assessment. The examiner observes and identifies aspects of the subject's behavior,assigns these to predetermined categories,and combines these categorized observations to produce quantitative scores for analysis. Research-determined cut-offs identify the potential diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder,allowing a standardized assessment of autistic symptoms.
Autism therapies include a wide variety of therapies that help people with autism,or their families. Such methods of therapy seek to aid autistic people in dealing with difficulties and increase their functional independence.
Stranger anxiety is a form of distress that children experience when exposed to strangers. Stranger anxiety and stranger fear are two interchangeable terms. Stranger anxiety is a typical part of the developmental sequence that most children experience. It can occur even if the child is with a caregiver or another person they trust. It peaks from six to 12 months but may recur afterwards until the age of 24 months. As a child gets older,stranger anxiety can be a problem as they begin to socialize. Children may become hesitant to play with unfamiliar children. Foster children are especially at risk,particularly if they experienced neglect early in their life.
The floortime or Developmental,Individual-differences,Relationship-based (DIR) model is a developmental model for assessing and understanding any child's strengths and weaknesses. This model was developed by Stanley Greenspan and first outlined in 1979 in his book Intelligence and Adaptation.
Emotional responsivity is the ability to acknowledge an affective stimuli by exhibiting emotion. It is a sharp change of emotion according to a person's emotional state. Increased emotional responsivity refers to demonstrating more response to a stimulus. Reduced emotional responsivity refers to demonstrating less response to a stimulus. Any response exhibited after exposure to the stimulus,whether it is appropriate or not,would be considered as an emotional response. Although emotional responsivity applies to nonclinical populations,it is more typically associated with individuals with schizophrenia and autism.
Attachment-based therapy applies to interventions or approaches based on attachment theory,originated by John Bowlby. These range from individual therapeutic approaches to public health programs to interventions specifically designed for foster carers. Although attachment theory has become a major scientific theory of socioemotional development with one of the broadest,deepest research lines in modern psychology,attachment theory has,until recently,been less clinically applied than theories with far less empirical support. This may be partly due to lack of attention paid to clinical application by Bowlby himself and partly due to broader meanings of the word 'attachment' used amongst practitioners. It may also be partly due to the mistaken association of attachment theory with the pseudo-scientific interventions misleadingly known as attachment therapy. The approaches set out below are examples of recent clinical applications of attachment theory by mainstream attachment theorists and clinicians and are aimed at infants or children who have developed or are at risk of developing less desirable,insecure attachment styles or an attachment disorder.
Classic autism,also known as childhood autism,autistic disorder,(early) infantile autism,infantile psychosis,Kanner's autism,Kanner's syndrome,or (formerly) just autism,is a neurodevelopmental condition first described by Leo Kanner in 1943. It is characterized by atypical and impaired development in social interaction and communication as well as restricted,repetitive behaviors,activities,and interests. These symptoms first appear in early childhood and persist throughout life.
Ami Klin is an American psychologist who studies autism. He is the first chief of autism and related disorders at the Marcus Autism Center,a wholly owned subsidiary of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Klin will also be a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar at Emory University and director of the Division of Autism and Related Developmental Disabilities in the Department of Pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine.
Autism is characterized by the early onset of impairments in reciprocal social interaction and communication and restricted repetitive behaviors or interests. One of the many hypotheses explaining the psychopathology of autism,the deficit in joint attention hypothesis is prominent in explaining the disorder's social and communicative deficits. Nonverbal autism is a subset of autism spectrum where the person does not learn how to speak. One study has shown that 64% of autistic children who are nonverbal at age 5,are still nonverbal 10 years later.
Social emotional development represents a specific domain of child development. It is a gradual,integrative process through which children acquire the capacity to understand,experience,express,and manage emotions and to develop meaningful relationships with others. As such,social emotional development encompasses a large range of skills and constructs,including,but not limited to:self-awareness,joint attention,play,theory of mind,self-esteem,emotion regulation,friendships,and identity development.
John N. Constantino is a child psychiatrist and expert on neurodevelopmental disorders,especially autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Constantino is the Blanche F. Ittleson Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine.
Lauren Bernstein Adamson was a developmental psychologist known for her research on communicative development,parent-child interaction,and joint attention in infants with typical and atypical developmental trajectories. She was a Regents' Professor Emerita of Psychology at Georgia State University.
Marian Diamond Sigman (1941–2012) was a developmental and child clinical psychologist known for her research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD). At the time of her death,she was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA).
The theory of the double empathy problem is a psychological and sociological theory first coined in 2012 by Damian Milton,an autistic autism researcher. This theory proposes that many of the difficulties autistic individuals face when socializing with non-autistic individuals are due,in part,to a lack of mutual understanding between the two groups,meaning that most autistic people struggle to understand and empathize with non-autistic people,whereas most non-autistic people also struggle to understand and empathize with autistic people. This lack of understanding may stem from bidirectional differences in communication style,social-cognitive characteristics,and experiences between autistic and non-autistic individuals,but not necessarily an inherent deficiency. Recent studies have shown that most autistic individuals are able to socialize,communicate effectively,empathize well,and display social reciprocity with most other autistic individuals. This theory and subsequent findings challenge the commonly held belief that the social skills of autistic individuals are inherently impaired,as well as the theory of "mind-blindness" proposed by prominent autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen in the mid-1980s,which suggested that empathy and theory of mind are universally impaired in autistic individuals.
Daniel Messinger is an American interdisciplinary developmental psychologist,and academic. His research works span the field of developmental psychology with a focus on emotional and social development of children and infants,and the interactive behavior of children in preschool inclusive classroom.
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