The Role of Executive Functioning in Predicting Social Competence in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
All children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience social difficulties but they differ with regard to the type and severity of their challenges. Potentially powerful interventions targeting social skills in children with ASD may have limited effectiveness if they are not tailored to the child's specific needs. One factor that may influence social competence is executive functioning (EF). EF may impact social competence by facilitating higher-order strategies such as emotional and cognitive regulation which are necessary for social interactions. Participants included 132 children and adolescents, aged 7-13, including 77 with ASD (M = 10.11, SD = 1.94), and 55 without ASD (M = 9.54, SD = 1.67). Caregivers completed the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning, Version 2 (BRIEF-2) Parent Form, assessing everyday EF skills, and the Multidimensional Social Competence Scale (MSCS). Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted separately for the group without ASD and the group with ASD, with MSCS entered as the dependent variables and EF indices and scales of the BRIEF-2 as the main predictor variables. EF deficits in emotional control predicted poor emotion regulation for both children with and without ASD. For the group without ASD, better emotional control and initiation skills predicted empathic concern and social knowledge, respectively. Challenges in self-monitoring significantly predicted difficulties with social inferencing and social knowledge for children with ASD. The findings highlight the importance of targeting specific EF skills that contribute to various aspects of social competence to increase the effectiveness of interventions for children with ASD. Autism Res 2020, 13: 1856-1866. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC LAY SUMMARY: We examined whether parents' ratings of their children's higher-order thinking skills (e.g., paying attention, organizing and planning, initiating tasks, regulating emotions, self-monitoring) predicted social competence among children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). For children without ASD, emotional control and initiation skills were strongly linked to their displays of empathy and social knowledge, respectively. For children with ASD, their abilities to be aware of their own behaviors and its impact on others were strongly related to their ability to interpret social cues and their social knowledge. For both groups, the ability to regulate their emotions were important predictors of their ability to modulate their emotions in social contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".