Families' experiences of raising concerns in health care services: An interpretative phenomenological analysis.

BACKGROUND: This exploratory study aimed to increase understanding of the experiences of families of people with intellectual disabilities when noticing and raising concerns in services. A qualitative design was employed. METHODS: Seven participants (all female) were recruited through local and national voluntary agencies; five were mothers of people with intellectual disabilities, one was the aunt and one the sister. Participants took part in semi-structured interviews centred on their experiences of noticing and raising concerns, these were recorded and transcribed. The data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; Smith, 1996). RESULTS: The data were grouped into three superordinate themes: the nature and importance of concerns, relationships between familes and staff and the process of raising concerns. A key and surprising finding was the importance of "the little things." CONCLUSIONS: This research highlights important implications for services such as the need to simplify the process of raising concerns, attend to the relationship with families and ensure advocacy services are identified for those without family.

Repetition Suppression in Ventral Visual Cortex Is Diminished as a Function of Increasing Autistic Traits.

Repeated viewing of a stimulus causes a change in perceptual sensitivity, known as a visual aftereffect. Similarly, in neuroimaging, repetitions of the same stimulus result in a reduction in the neural response, known as repetition suppression (RS). Previous research shows that aftereffects for faces are reduced in both children with autism and in first-degree relatives. With functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that the magnitude of RS to faces in neurotypical participants was negatively correlated with individual differences in autistic traits. We replicated this finding in a second experiment, while additional experiments showed that autistic traits also negatively predicted RS to images of scenes and simple geometric shapes. These findings suggest that a core aspect of neural function--the brain's response to repetition--is modulated by autistic traits.

High autistic trait individuals do not modulate gaze behaviour in response to social presence but look away more when actively engaged in an interaction.

Autism is characterised by difficulties in social functioning, notably in interactions with other people. Yet, most studies addressing social difficulties have used static images or, at best, videos of social stimuli, with no scope for real interaction. Here, we study one crucial aspect of social interactions-gaze behaviour-in an interactive setting. First, typical individuals were shown videos of an experimenter and, by means of a deception procedure, were either led to believe that the experimenter was present via a live video-feed or was pre-recorded. Participants' eye movements revealed that when passively viewing an experimenter they believed to be "live," they looked less at that person than when they believed the experimenter video was pre-recorded. Interestingly, this reduction in viewing behaviour in response to the believed "live" presence of the experimenter was absent in individuals high in autistic traits, suggesting a relative insensitivity to social presence alone. When participants were asked to actively engage in a real-time interaction with the experimenter, however, high autistic trait individuals looked significantly less at the experimenter relative to low autistic trait individuals. The results reinforce findings of atypical gaze behaviour in individuals high in autistic traits, but suggest that active engagement in a social interaction may be important in eliciting reduced looking. We propose that difficulties with the spatio-temporal dynamics associated with real social interactions rather than underlying difficulties processing the social stimulus itself may drive these effects. The results underline the importance of developing ecologically valid methods to investigate social cognition. Autism Res 2017, 10: 359-368. © 2016 The Authors Autism Research published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Autism Research.