3 results
18 Improving Job Interview Skills in Autistic Youth Using a Combined Intervention Approach Inspired by Positive Psychology
- Helen M Genova, Mikayla Haas, Heba Elsayed, Michael Dacanay, Lauren Hendrix, John DeLuca
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- Journal:
- Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society / Volume 29 / Issue s1 / November 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 December 2023, pp. 627-628
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Objective:
Nearly 85% of adults on the autism spectrum are unemployed, although nearly 70% of those who are unemployed express a desire and willingness to work. The job interview has been identified as a significant obstacle to obtaining employment by young adults on the spectrum. A growing field of research has been focused on evaluating innovative training tools to improve interview skills. Our previous work shows that a virtual reality job interview training (VR-JIT) tool improves certain job interview skills (such as sounding professional, establishing rapport), but does not improve the ability to speak about personal strengths and abilities. The current study combined VR-JIT with a new training tool: Kessler Foundation Strength Identification and Expression (KF-STRIDE), an intervention grounded in principles of positive psychology. KF-STRIDE targets identification of personal character strengths and expressing those strengths to employers in a socially appropriate way.
Participants and Methods:The current study evaluated data from 20 autistic youth, randomized to an experimental group (n=10) and a services-as-usual (SAU) control group (n=10). Those in the experimental group participated in a 12 session intervention (9 sessions using VR-JIT and 3 sessions in KF-STRIDE). Each session was roughly one hour. Job interview performance was assessed by video-recorded mock job interviews rated by blinded assessors pre- and post- the intervention. Paired samples t-tests were conducted to examine differences in job interview skills from baseline to follow up in both groups.
Results:The intervention group showed a significant improvement from baseline to follow-up in job interview skills in general (p = .004), and specifically sharing strengths about themselves to a future employer (p = .004). No significant differences were seen from baseline to follow-up in the SAU group. Conclusions: Individuals on the autism spectrum are significantly underemployed, which negatively impacts one’s ability to lead an independent life. Two innovative tools: VR-JIT and KF-STRIDE successfully improved job interview skills, including the ability to identify and express personal strengths. These findings indicate that these combined tools may help to improve employment skills for individuals on the autism spectrum.
20 Using Automated Sentiment Analysis to Examine Self-Evaluation in Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Jacob D Gronemeyer, Mikayla Haas, Heba Elsayed, Michael Dacanay, Helen Genova
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- Journal:
- Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society / Volume 29 / Issue s1 / November 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 December 2023, p. 629
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Objective:
Individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience negative self-evaluation, indicated by low levels of self-esteem and describing themselves more negatively to others. Variations in reading comprehension, difficulty identifying emotions, and masking (camouflaging of autistic traits) make it difficult to accurately measure self-evaluation of individuals with ASD using subjective self-report scales such as the Rosenburg Self-Esteem Scale. Therefore, it is important to explore more objective methods of measuring self-evaluation in ASD. Sentiment analysis is a popular Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique used to quantify the emotional content of language programmatically by automatically transforming text into a data frame of words represented as individual values or tokens. Each token can then be categorized as positive or negative with a sentiment dictionary. The current study aims to investigate an automated sentiment analysis approach to evaluate self-evaluation by quantifying implicit linguistic affective valence of ASD participants' verbal self-describing statements in a naturalistic setting. Specifically, we evaluated the frequency of positive or negative words used during a mock job interview in which individuals with ASD were asked to describe themselves. We then examined the relationship between positive and negative word usage and standard self-report measures of self-evaluation.
Participants and Methods:Twenty-four young adults with ASD were included in this study with an age range of 15-24 and a mean age of 19.2 years. Participants completed a battery of assessments including a mock job interview in which they were asked to describe themselves as a measure of implicit self-esteem. Self-esteem and knowledge of personal strengths was assessed using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and Strengths Knowledge Scale, respectively. Interview transcripts were automatically transformed into word token data frames using the tidytext package in Rstudio. Frequencies of positive and negative words were calculated and their ratio to total word count was used to measure the implicit positivity and negativity of transcripts.
Results:There was a significant negative correlation between the frequency of negative sentiment in transcripts and measure on the Rosenburg Self-Esteem Scale (r = -.376, p = .035) and the Strengths Knowledge Scale (r = -.387, p = .031) indicating that individuals with higher self-esteem and knowledge of their strengths used fewer negative words when talking during a mock interview.
Conclusions:While our results are preliminary, this pilot study represents the first to use automated sentiment analysis to study self-evaluation in individuals with ASD. The use of this technique on natural linguistic data collected through a mock job interview allows researchers to quantitatively analyze the emotionality of transcriptions and create insights that would otherwise be unavailable using more subjective qualitative techniques. Limited research into self-evaluation in this population has yielded inconsistent results, relying too heavily upon qualitative or self-report measures. The ability to programmatically quantify affective valence in transcripts is a time and cost-effective technique for improving validity of future measures of self-evaluation.
42 Behavioral Correlates of Action-Control in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
- Uriel L Richman, Michael Dacanay, Amira Herstic, Joman Y Natsheh
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- Journal:
- Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society / Volume 29 / Issue s1 / November 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 December 2023, pp. 649-650
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Objective:
Children with attention/deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) exhibit motivational and cognitive impairments that affect daily life functioning. These impairments may reflect a deficit in action-control; the process by which voluntary actions are selected and executed based on prior reinforcement learning. It consists of parallel opposing processes; goal-direction and habit formation. Using the outcome-devaluation paradigm, we previously showed that children with ADHD rely on reflexive habitual, at the expense of goal-directed, behavior to deploy their actions. The current study investigates action-control using a contingency degradation paradigm, which involves outcome overvaluation as opposed to outcome devaluation. We hypothesize that children with ADHD will display a habitual behavior, while healthy controls (HC) will use goal-directed behavior to control their actions.
Participants and Methods:We tested 19 ADHD and 14 HC participants (age 6-10 years) for this study. Children with ADHD were recruited from Children’s Specialized Hospital and underwent a structured clinical diagnosis. All participants were screened for ADHD and other neurologic or psychiatric conditions that could contribute to attention impairment using the SNAP-IV rating scale. Participants completed a set of the Woodcock-Johnson® IV assessments. They were tested using an outcome-overvaluation computer-based task. During learning, participants acquired stimulus-reward associations in the acquisition phase, as well as the overvaluation phase. In the latter, one of the rewards was delivered in a similar contingency to the acquisition phase (valued), while the other reward was randomly accompanied by an extra reward in 10% of the trials (overvalued). After the overvaluation phase, participants were presented with two stimuli (associated with a valued, and an overvalued outcome) and were asked to choose one stimulus in extinction. Choosing the overvalued at a higher rate was assigned as goal-directed behavior, while choosing both stimuli at the same rate was assigned as habitual behavior.
Results:Independent-samples t-test showed that children with ADHD scored significantly higher than HC in the following measures: ADHD_inattention, ADHD_hyperactive/Impulsive, ADHD_combined, inattention/overactivity, Conner’s index, inattention domain, hyperactive/impulsive domain, and general anxiety disorder screening (P-value for all is <0.001). Results from the computer-based task showed that both groups acquired action-outcome associations during the first two phases of the task. During the extinction phase, HC, as compared to ADHD, responded at a higher rate on the stimuli that were associated with the overvalued outcome (t(31)=2.1, p=0.043); indicating higher tendency to show goal-directed behavior. Further, paired-samples t-test showed that there was no significant difference between response rate on the valued vs. overvalued stimuli in the ADHD group (t(18)=1.027, p=0.318), while there was a difference trending towards significance in response rate in the HC group (t(13)=-2.00, p=0.067). These results show that ADHD responded habitually, while HC responses were goal-directed.
Conclusions:Our results indicate that children with ADHD are less likely than HC to engage in goal-directed behavior as opposed to habitual responding. This is consistent with our previous research highlighting a deficit in action-control in ADHD.