Early Interaction Between Infants with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Their Parents: Studies On Expression of Distress

Background: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a disorder that affects language and social skills to varying degrees. While many studies have concentrated on examining the patterns of behavior and development in the context of speaking and interacting, very few studies have investigated the specificity of cry in infants with ASD. And this is very peculiar considering that cry can be viewed as both the first communicative system and the first social structure infants can use to communicate with their parents. In our previous studies, waveform analysis showed different patterns in cry episodes of children with ASD and Typically Developing (TD) ones.

Objectives: The aim of this research project is to investigate how the crying of children with ASD, as opposed to TD children and to children with Developmental Delay (DD) is perceived from their parents.

Methods: Different methodologies are being used in this project. In particular, we listed tow studies: (i) Reaction Time experiment for testing whether the atypical structure of autistic cry can bias the parents' perception and (ii) Analysis of Fundamental frequencies of cry.

Results: It has been found consistent agreement among the results of the two studies. All the methodologies showed that cry episodes of ASD seemed to be more similar to those of younger TD or DD children. Balanced for age, ASD cries elicited negative patterns of emotional states as compared to parents' responses to the cries of TD children. These data highlight that cry of children with autism are not well identified.

Conclusions: These results support the view of autism as related to a problem of expressing and sharing emotions. ASD cries have ambiguous patterns, and therefore may not seem understandable. Parents' reactions to autistic cries are qualitatively different from their responses to cries of children with TD of the same age. This difference can be an additional cause of difficulty in sharing feelings and developing inter-subjectivity processes.