ABA is Functional. Unique. Natural. Here’s a great process to create a FUN ABA goal: 1. ABA goals are functional. This means goals are chosen because they are of importance to the child and the child’s ability to be a part of the community. That is, within the family, school, at the groc…

By Christa Holmans, Neurodivergent Rebel In early February the stores begin to fill with pink, red, and white hearts. Memories of elementary school come flooding in. Suddenly I’m sitting in a small-town classroom, peering down into an empty Valentine box. I’ve never attracted a mate who was into giv…

Only half of autistic people who commit suicide have a diagnosis of depression, and this study sheds some light on why that could be.Source: The Autism Site

It’s been nearly three months since Joshua Gordon took the reins as director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In that time, Gordon has made it clear that one of his top priorities will be ‘circuit science’ — investigations into the clusters of neurons that underlie certain beh…

October is National Disability History Month and National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Richard Pimentel was one of the first disability activists to work with United States government agencies and Fortune 500 companies in diversity training and providing employment for people with disabili…

In 1987, psychologist Ole Ivar Lovaas reported that the optimal ‘dose’ for an autism therapy he had developed was 40 hours a week. The intensive therapy, a type of applied behavior analysis (ABA), led to “normal” functioning for 9 of 19 children with autism in his study, he said1. Just 10 hours of t…

Taylor Cross reviews the video game God of War (2018) There are few games released every console generation that are on the level of Santa Monica Studios’ newest game, Dad of Son, I mean, God of War (2018). If you can, you should do whatever it takes to play it. Now that I’ve heaped prai…

Sarah Sunny, a 27-year-old lawyer from India, recently made history by becoming the first deaf lawyer to argue a case in the country’s Supreme Court. Her journey began in the city of Bengaluru, where she faced initial challenges in lower courts due to a lack of sign language interpreters. Howe…

The largest study of people with autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) to date adds to mounting evidence that the two conditions share genetic roots1. Compared with their typical peers, people with autism are twice as likely to receive a diagnosis of OCD and people with OCD are four times a…

The post Spotted around the web: Week of 4 November 2019 appeared first on Spectrum | Autism Research News. Source: Spectrum News

According to WHO, there are 285 million people worldwide that are visually impaired and 90% of this population lives in poverty. It goes without saying that visually impaired people face challenges on a daily basis. However, it is also refreshing to see makers and individuals out there building solu…

Gabriel is 8 years old and happens to be non-verbal with autism. His family thinks he’s super!  Some of his favorite things include Batman, the color orange, reading, animals & letters! Super G? We think you’re super too! Welcome to the Mighty League: Would you like us to feature yo…

Autistic women show unusually strong connections, and autistic men unusually weak ones, between two specific brain regions, according to a new study1. The connections stretch from two regions within the cerebellum, which governs movement, emotion and language, to parts of the cerebral cortex. The la…

By Megan Amodeo Who has the biggest house? The best car? The most intelligent children? The most athletic children? Sometimes it seems that we spend the majority of our days comparing ourselves with other people and their children. I’m sure we’ve all been compared with others at least once in our li…