“40,41 Both studies utilized a group intervention approach to teach specific social skills. Frankel and colleagues taught conversation skills, peer entry, handling teasing, practicing good sportsmanship, and

good host behaviors using Children’s Friendship Training. In concurrent sessions, parents were taught how to facilitate the use of these skills at home by arranging for supervised ”play dates.“ Compared with a delayed SB203580 purchase treatment control group, parents of children in the intervention group reported that their children showed increased social skills and other appropriate play date behaviors. Further, the children in the intervention group self-reported increased Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical popularity Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and decreased

loneliness compared with those who did not receive the intervention. In a study of the Skillstreaming approach, Lopata and colleagues targeted social skills, emotion recognition, and understanding of metaphoric language. Parents received a concurrent educational session focused on understanding symptoms of ASD and techniques for generalization of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical skills learned in the child intervention group. Compared with a delayed treatment control group, the intervention group showed increased parent-reported social skills. Further, children in the intervention group showed increases on standardized measures of emotion recognition and non-literal language interpretation. Both studies are encouraging and suggest that caregiver-mediated social skills

interventions may be more successful at Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical increasing flexibility and generalization of skills to the community setting than traditional social skills intervention Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical programs. Cognitive behavioral interventions for anxiety Many children with autism experience clinical significant levels of anxiety, with 11% to 84% of children and adolescents with ASD reported to have a diagnosable comorbid anxiety disorder:42 Anxiety symptoms are varied and can include behavioral outbursts (yelling, aggression), repetitive behaviors (asking repetitive questions, reciting television quotes, pacing), withdrawal, and refusal to engage in activities. These anxiety symptoms are often debilitating for the family and the child with ASD. For example, many we saw a child in the clinic with an irrational fear of “black top” surfaces, which led to temper tantrums when he was asked to leave the car to walk across a store parking lot. The most common anxiety symptoms in children and adolescents with ASD are compulsive/ritualistic behavior and irrational fears and beliefs. Leyfer and colleagues43 reported that 44% of the children and adolescents with ASD in their study experienced specific phobias and 37% experienced symptoms consistent with obsessive-compulsive disorder.