Can videogaming benefit young people with autism spectrum disorder?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1 in 88 children in the U.S. has autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a broad group of neurodevelopmental disorders. Children and adolescents with ASD are typically fascinated by screen-based technology such as videogames and these can be used for educational and treatment purposes as described in an insightful Roundtable Discussion published in Games for Health Journal: Research Development, and Clinical Applications, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.. The article is available free on the Games for Health Journal website.

Individuals with ASD have difficulty with communication and social interaction, but they often have particularly good visual perceptual skills and respond well to visual stimuli. Videogames offer opportunities for successful learning, motivation to improve skills such as planning, organization, and self-monitoring, and reinforcement of desired behaviors without the need for direct human-to-human interaction.

Autism is a growing area of interest for the gamification community, and Games for Health Journal continues to explore various aspects of how videogame technology can be beneficial in treating this complex spectrum of disorders. In a previous issue of the Journal, the article "Comparing Energy Expenditure in Adolescents with and without Autism while Playing Nintendo® Wii™ Games" described how gaming might help individuals with ASD increase their daily physical activity to prevent obesity.

"Children and young adults with ASD have unique opportunities to capitalize on their interest and aptitude in videogames as a resource to develop desired social behaviors and life skills and to increase their physical activity," says Games for Health Journal Editor-in-Chief Bill Ferguson, PhD, who moderated the Roundtable.

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Popular kids in US and Mexico more likely to smoke,

New research from the University of Southern California (USC) and University of Texas finds that popular students in seven Southern California high schools are more likely to smoke cigarettes than their less popular counterparts.

The study, which appears online this week in the Journal of Adolescent Health, confirms trends observed in previous USC-led studies of students in the sixth through 12th grades across the United States and in Mexico.

"That we're still seeing this association more than 10 years later, despite marginal declines in smoking, suggests that popularity is a strong predictor of smoking behavior," said Thomas W. Valente, Ph.D., professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and lead author of three prior studies on the subject.

In the newest study, Valente and colleagues asked 1,950 students in the ninth and 10th grades in October 2006 and 2007 whether they had ever tried smoking, how frequently they had smoked in the past 30 days, how many students their age they thought smoked cigarettes, how they perceived their close friends felt about smoking, and who their five best friends were at school. Popularity was measured by the frequency that other respondents named a student as a friend.

The researchers found that those who believed their close friends smoked were more likely to also smoke, even if their perception was incorrect. Popular students became smokers earlier than the less popular. And students who became smokers between the ninth and 10th grade were more likely to form friendships with other smokers.

Surprisingly, student perception of the norm (i.e., out of 100 students your age, how many do you think smoke cigarettes once a month or more?) was less likely to influence smoking than the perceived behavior of their close friends.

In a 2012 study that appeared in Salud Pública de México, the bi-monthly journal published by the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública (National Institute of Public Health), Valente and colleagues at the Mexican Social Security Institute surveyed 399 teenagers at a high school in Jalisco. Two other studies — one in 2005 that polled 1,486 students in the sixth and seventh grades across Southern California and another in 2001 that polled 2,525 high-school students across the United States — also appeared in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

"Adolescence is a time when students turn to others to figure out what is important. These are four different samples, now, coming from different places — and the finding is consistent," Valente said.

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Social exclusion in the playground

Being the last one picked for the team, getting left out of the clique of cool girls, having no one to sit with at lunch… For children, social exclusion can impact everything from emotional well being to academic achievements.

But what does it mean for the kids doing the excluding? Is the cure a one-size-fits-all approach that requires kids to include others, regardless of the situation at hand? Not necessarily, says new research from a professor now at Concordia University.

Unlike previous studies where researchers created hypothetical situations and pre-selected the reasons for exclusion that kids could choose from, the Concordia study asked kids to talk about a time when they excluded a peer.


Holly Recchia is an assistant professor in Concordia’s Department of Education >>

“Research that looks at kids’ own point of view about social exclusion will help us do a better job of supporting their ability to successfully navigate these situations,” says Holly Recchia, an assistant professor in Concordia’s Department of Education and member of the Centre for Research in Human Development. She is first author of the study, con-ducted while she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah.

The recent study published in the journal Cognitive Development shows that the expe-riences of exclusion for those doing the excluding are actually much more diverse than what previous studies have shown, and that a more nuanced approach is needed to encourage social inclusion.

This approach allowed Recchia and her colleagues at the University of Utah to form a broader picture of exclusion. The kids’ narratives included not just reasons for exclusion but also why they judged their reasons to be good or bad. For example, “it was a bad reason because now his feelings are hurt” or “it was a good reason because I don’t work well with her.”

In some cases, children tried to numb their negative feelings about exclusion by ignoring a situation, while in others they spontaneously looked for an alternative to exclusion. In both cases, they had mixed feelings about whether their reasons were good or bad.

“It’s the search for alternatives to exclusion that we want to encourage. The fact that children can do this spontaneously reflects children’s awareness of their own capacity to behave differently in the future and can be an entry point for intervention,” says Recchia.

The study also showed that the experience of exclusion changes as kids got older. Se-ven year-olds mostly reported uncontrollable circumstances and peer pressure as rea-sons for exclusion, depicting themselves as blameless. As the youngsters reached their teenage years, however, they showed more responsibility when they talked about exclu-ding others, often reporting reasons that were within their control.

This information could help researchers come up with age-specific interventions. In the case of younger kids, the best approach is to help them take responsibility for their ac-tions, which would encourage them to see what they could have done differently.

“The most useful interventions will be the ones that allow kids to weigh different goals, across different kinds of situations,” says Recchia. “This flexibility would allow them to handle exclusion in ways that minimize harm to other people while still recognizing their own legitimate desires and perspectives.”

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