Evidence-based social skills training for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders: the UCLA PEERS program.
Teaching teens with autism to read hidden thoughts pays off in real friendships.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team looked at teens with autism who can speak well. They gave the UCLA PEERS social-skills class.
Then they tested how well each teen could guess what other people think. They used a hard false-belief task called second-order false belief.
Last, they watched for real-life social wins, like getting invited to parties or avoiding fights.
What they found
Teens who passed the hard mind-reading task also had fewer social problems later. Better scores on the test meant better real friendships.
The skill of reading hidden thoughts was the key link, not IQ or language scores.
How this fits with other research
Yoo et al. (2014) ran the same PEERS plan in Korea and saw the same social gains. This match shows the program travels across cultures.
Laugeson et al. (2014) moved PEERS out of the clinic and into middle-school classrooms. Teachers ran the lessons and still got medium social gains. The 2012 paper set the stage; the 2014 paper proved it works at school.
Van Hecke et al. (2015) looked inside the brain after PEERS. They found left-side EEG shifts linked to more friends. The 2012 study used behavior tests; the 2015 study added neural proof. Both point to the same win.
Why it matters
You now have a clear target: teach advanced perspective-taking. Add second-order false-belief drills to your PEERS lessons. A quick role-play where teens guess hidden motives can boost later friendship success.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience marked challenges with social function by definition, but few modifiable predictors of social functioning in ASD have been identified in extant research. This study hypothesized that deficits in social cognition and motor function may help to explain poor social functioning in individuals with ASD. METHOD: Cross-sectional data from 108 individuals with ASD and without intellectual disability ages 9 through 27.5 were used to assess the relationship between social cognition and motor function, and social functioning. RESULTS: Results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that greater social cognition, but not motor function, was significantly associated with better social functioning when controlling for sex, age, and intelligence quotient. Post-hoc analyses revealed that, better performance on second-order false belief tasks was associated with higher levels of socially adaptive behavior and lower levels of social problems. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings support the development and testing of interventions that target social cognition in order to improve social functioning in individuals with ASD. Interventions that teach generalizable skills to help people with ASD better understand social situations and develop competency in advanced perspective taking have the potential to create more durable change because their effects can be applied to a wide and varied set of situations and not simply a prescribed set of rehearsed situations.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2012 · doi:10.1007/s10803-011-1339-1