Increasing young children's honest reports and decreasing their transgressions.

Young children break rules (i.e., transgress) and then lie about those transgressions. By adolescence, lying is associated with decreased trust, communication, and quality of relationships, and with befriending antisocial peers. To decrease lies, we replicated differentially reinforcing honest reports about transgressions for one 6-year-old neurotypical child and two 7-year-old children who were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. After all children learned to report honestly about transgressions, we extended past research to decrease transgressions by differentially reinforcing alternative play behaviors. For all children, this resulted in increased levels of play, decreased transgressions, and continued honesty about infrequent transgressions. Caregivers were satisfied with children's increased honest reports and decreased transgressions. The results support first reinforcing children's honest reports about transgressions and then decreasing transgressions to satisfying levels for caregivers.

The beginning of a friendship: Teaching individuals with autism to identify shared interests.

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.