If you want to develop an effective autism training, ask autistic students to help you.

LAY ABSTRACT: Autistic university students are often left out because people do not understand autism. We wanted to help people understand autism. Most autism trainings are not made by autistic people. Autistic people know what it is like to be autistic. So autistic people may be the best teachers when it comes to teaching about autism. Autistic students and non-autistic professors made an autism training. The students made videos for the training. They also helped make questions to see what people learned from the trainings. Professors who are not autistic made a training on their own. Students in New York City tried out the trainings. After they answered questions, they did either the training the autistic students helped make or the training made by only professors. Then, they answered questions again. We learned from the students how to make our trainings better. Then, students from two universities in the United States and one university in Lebanon did our trainings and questions. Both trainings made hidden feelings about autism better. The training autistic students helped make taught students more than the training professors made on their own. The autistic-led training also helped students accept autism more. These studies show that autistic students can make autism research and trainings better. At the end of this article, autistic students share their ideas for how to make autism trainings even better in the future.

Impact of an Inclusive Postsecondary Education Program on Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward Intellectual Disability.

People with intellectual disability (ID) experience negative consequences as a result of stigmas held by the public. Students with ID involved in inclusive postsecondary education (IPSE) programs demonstrate positive outcomes. This study examines the impact of an IPSE program on typically matriculating student attitudes toward ID. Explicit and implicit attitudes were measured at the start and end of a semester among IPSE volunteer peer mentors (n = 17) and an uninvolved student group (n = 14). Findings indicate that volunteers demonstrated lower discomfort after their volunteer experience, as measured by the Attitudes Toward Intellectual Disability Questionnaire (ATTID). Volunteers also demonstrated higher knowledge of causes and preference for interaction with people with ID than nonvolunteers. This demonstrates that volunteer involvement in IPSE positively impacts attitudes toward people with ID among typically matriculating college students.

Affective reactivity to cry sounds predicts young women's reactivity and behavior in a simulated caregiving task.

Different populations of adults (experienced vs. inexperienced caregivers, men vs. women, abusive vs. nonabusive parents, etc.) have been reported to differ in their affective reactions to the sounds of infant crying. These differences are thought to impact caregiving behavior and, in some instances, to affect long-term outcomes for infants. There can be great intra-group variation, however, even when group differences are significant; modeling developmental process will require a finer grained approach. We have undertaken a pair of studies intended to validate the Negative Affect Scale (NA) from the PANAS as a measure of individuals' affective reactivity to cry sounds. In Study 1, 306 young women who were not yet mothers listened either to infant crying or to birdsong. The results supported the NA as a measure of reactivity to crying. In Study 2, a new sample of 301 young women listened to crying in a screening task; a group of "high reactors" (n = 21) and a group of "low reactors" (n = 22) then participated in a simulated caregiving situation. Individuals' affective reactivity to the caregiving simulation mirrored their affective reactivity in the screening task, and rates and overall organization of caregiving behavior differed between the groups. Changes in negative affect, then, appear to be both a result of infant crying and a determinant of some aspects of caregiving behavior. Further studies will extend these laboratory results to real infants and their caregivers, and further validate the NA as a measure of individual differences in reactivity to cry sounds.