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Lay Abstract: What is already known about the topic? Parents of children with autism experience enormous challenges managing the complex needs of caring for their children. This includes coordinating multiple and complex therapies and acting as partners in treatment. Parenting self-efficacy is the confidence a person has in their ability to manage the tasks that are part of raising a child. People who have more confidence, or greater parenting self-efficacy, often feel less stressed and are more able to manage the demands of family life. This is particularly important for parents with children who have autism spectrum disorder, since they experience more parenting pressures. Although a lot is known about parenting self-efficacy in parents of neurotypical children, we do not know enough about how to help parents of children with autism spectrum disorder develop greater parenting self-efficacy. What this paper adds? This study shows that parents gain a greater sense of parenting self-efficacy when they feel more involved in their child's therapy and are more satisfied with the training they receive as part of these therapies. We also find that feeling pressure related to being a caregiver of a child with autism spectrum disorder can undermine autism-specific parenting self-efficacy. However, parents' sense of confidence was not limited by the severity of their child's symptoms. Implications for practice, research, or policy The results suggest that there is an opportunity to help parents develop a greater sense of confidence in their ability to manage the complexities of raising a child with autism spectrum disorder by helping them feel more involved in treatment and by creating intervention-related training experiences that are more satisfying. Providers might also help by taking time to address the challenges and pressures that parents are experiencing, and helping them find ways to deal with these challenges. We suggest that there needs to be more research exploring how providers can best design interventions that support autism-specific parenting self-efficacy as a way of improving parental and child well-being.

Neurotypical adults often form negative first impressions of individuals with autism spectrum disorder and are less interested in engaging with them socially. In contrast, individuals with autism spectrum disorder actively seek out the company of others who share their diagnosis. It is not clear, however, whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder form more positive first impressions of autistic peers when diagnosis is not explicitly shared. We asked adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder to watch brief video clips of adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder and answer questions about their impressions of the individuals in the videos. Questions were related to participants' perceptions of the social skills of the individuals in the video, as well as their own willingness to interact with that person. We also measured gaze patterns to the faces, eyes, and mouths of adolescents in the video stimuli. Both participant groups spent less time gazing at videos of autistic adolescents. Regardless of diagnostic group, all participants provided more negative judgments of autistic than neurotypical adolescents in the videos. These data indicate that, without being explicitly informed of a shared diagnosis, adolescents with autism spectrum disorder form negative first impressions of autistic adolescents that are similar to, or lower than, those formed by neurotypical peers.

We form first impressions of many traits based on very short interactions. This study examines whether typical adults judge children with high-functioning autism to be more socially awkward than their typically developing peers based on very brief exposure to still images, audio-visual, video-only, or audio-only information. We used video and audio recordings of children with and without high-functioning autism captured during a story-retelling task. Typically developing adults were presented with 1 s and 3 s clips of these children, as well as still images, and asked to judge whether the person in the clip was socially awkward. Our findings show that participants who are naïve to diagnostic differences between the children in the clips judged children with high-functioning autism to be socially awkward at a significantly higher rate than their typically developing peers. These results remain consistent for exposures as short as 1 s to visual and/or auditory information, as well as for still images. These data suggest that typical adults use subtle nonverbal and non-linguistic cues produced by children with high-functioning autism to form rapid judgments of social awkwardness with the potential for significant repercussions in social interactions., (© The Author(s) 2014.)