The beginning of a friendship: Teaching individuals with autism to identify shared interests
A quick BST package teaches autistic learners to spot and label shared interests, making small talk more meaningful.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Three autistic learners worked with a therapist for 30-minute sessions.
The team used Behavioral Skills Training: explain, model, practice, feedback.
They taught the skill of spotting shared interests during short role-play chats.
What they found
All three learners quickly learned to name shared interests.
They used the skill with new partners and kept it after training ended.
Gains were large and steady across every probe.
How this fits with other research
Celani (2002) once showed autistic kids prefer objects to people. That looks like a clash, but the kids in that study were 8-11 and untrained. Hood et al. show older or trained learners can learn to value shared topics.
Goldstein et al. (1991) taught parents to use time delay to spark speech. Hood’s work builds on that idea, moving from any speech to smart speech about common likes.
Kizir (2025) used the same BST steps to teach menstrual tracking. Same method, new goal—proof the package is flexible.
Why it matters
You can add a 2-minute drill after any social skills lesson. Ask the learner to sort cards into “shared” or “not shared” based on the chat you just practiced. This small step locks in the bigger skill of finding common ground.
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Join Free →After role-play, have the learner point to which topics you both like—use thumbs-up cards for instant feedback.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with conversation skill deficits often have difficulties discriminating cues of interest and uninterest from their conversation partner(s). We used behavioral skills training (BST) to teach 3 individuals with autism spectrum disorder to converse about the conversation partner's topics of interest, initiate strategic preferred topics to identify shared interests after indices of uninterest, and end the conversation. We assessed generality of each skill across conversation partners and ratings of social acceptability. We replicated previous research on BST producing robust increases in following the conversation, shifting the topic of conversation, and ending the conversation. In addition, all participants learned to categorize shared interests. We observed overall high levels of generality across following, shifting, and ending the conversation with all conversation partners. However, for 2 out of the 3 participants the inclusion of rules was necessary to promote the generality of the intraverbal categorization response. We discuss the implication of these findings for clinical practice and future research.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2022 · doi:10.1002/jaba.951