Social relatedness and autism: current research, issues, directions.
Social relatedness stays the widest autism symptom, but single-skill drills barely move it—target real friendships instead.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Danforth et al. (1990) wrote a big-picture review. They asked: what is social relatedness in autism?
They read earlier work and mapped three ideas. Maybe the core problem is feelings, talking, or thinking.
What they found
The team said social relatedness is the widest autism symptom. They showed experts still argue about the root.
How this fits with other research
Gillespie-Lynch et al. (2019) later pooled 133 studies. The usual suspects—joint attention, theory-of-mind—only weakly link to real social life. This hard number closes the 1990 debate: single skills do not explain the gap.
Karkhaneh et al. (2010) hunted for fixes. Only six good trials test Social Stories™ for interaction gains. The tool bag is still small, just as the 1990 paper warned.
Caldwell-Harris et al. (2024) flipped the camera. Autistic adults say they skip status games and want fair friendships. Their insider view widens the 1990 lens: less deficit, more difference.
Why it matters
Stop hunting one magic social skill. Pair tiny social targets with real friendship chances. Ask clients what ‘good friend’ means to them, then teach those steps.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Social relatedness has recently become a primary focus of investigators in the field of autism. This shift to regarding disturbances in social relatedness as one of the defining manifestations of the disorder marks the movement of research on autistic disorder back to its origins, when Kanner first noted the "social and affective" symptoms of autism as pathognomonic. Currently, social impairment in autism is viewed as more pervasively characteristic of the disorder than any other single symptom. Further, there has been a recent proliferation of research designed to document the nature of social deficit in autism, and whether it is primarily affective, communicative, or cognitive in nature, or involves some combination of these three variables. This review summarizes recent research focusing on social relatedness in autism and discusses the implications of these findings.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1990 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(90)90015-z