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CAAR Newsletter Issue III September, 2018
In this issue: events, free online course, research, conferences and prizes
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Autism Summer School
CAAR’s 6th University of Bath Autism Summer School (UBASS) was held this August. Thirty students on the autism spectrum who are thinking about going to University came to UBASS for a taster of university life. The students spent 3 days and 2 nights sampling lectures, clubs and societies as well as a range of workshops focussed on topics such as managing anxiety and issues around disclosing diagnoses. Students had the opportunity to take part in research if they wanted to and social activities included visiting the Roman Baths.
From the feedback, the students genuinely seemed to benefit from the experience and felt enabled to make an informed decision about their future. And they had a good time! New this year was a photo competition, where the students were invited to take a photograph encapsulating either ‘work’, ‘rest’ or ‘play’. The winners were…
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UBASS is free for the students thanks to generous support from Robert Burgess, The Three Guineas Trust and Widening Participation.
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ESRC Festival of Social Science funding
Respecting neurodiversity: Communicating with autistic service users
Jade Norris and Katie Maras from have been awarded funding by the ESRC to run an event at Swansea University as part of the ESRC’s Festival of Social Science.
Although autism awareness is improving, service providers are often unsure about how to apply this awareness in their roles. With the public sector under pressure to reduce costs, ensuring that communication is effective reduces recurring issues and misunderstandings that not only cause anxiety for the person, but increase time and financial burdens on public services (e.g., repeated doctors’ appointments due to poor communication/missed diagnoses; multiple benefits assessments and tribunals). For the private sector, facilitating communication with autistic people in job interviews can bring a range of valuable, under-appreciated skills to the workplace, which can help boost creativity and profits.
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Our event, which is aimed at service providers and professionals who work with autistic people (e.g., benefits and PIP assessors, housing officers, council staff, support workers, HR teams, occupational therapists, job centre staff, receptionists, doctors, nurses, dentists, and psychologists), aims to provide more than standard training or awareness programmes, which often take problematic ‘one size fits all’ approaches. Service providers attending the event will be supported by researchers and autistic adults to create novel methods for facilitating communication with autistic service users within their own services.
Respecting neurodiversity: Communicating with autistic service users takes place at Swansea University on November 7th 2018. More information and registration for the event: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/myevent?eid=48478040123
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CAAR won a prize for best image in the 2018 'Images of Research' competition
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Free online course from CAAR for all teachers, parents and autistic people
Good Practice in Autism Education
What's involved?
- Understanding autism and intellectual disabilities
- Developing an inclusive curriculum
- Good practice in autism education
- Sharing good practice
See: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/autism-education
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CAAR RESEARCH
It's been a busy few months for research at CAAR! Continue reading to see what we've been up to...
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ADEPT feasibility study finishes – next steps
The ADEPT (Autism Depression Trial) a feasibility randomised controlled trial of a low-intensity psychological intervention for depression in autistic adults was completed in May 2018.
The study, funded by the Health Technology Assessment scheme of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) started in December 2015 and the Randomised Control Trial (RCT) started recruitment in October 2016 with recruitment ending 12 months later.
The study was a collaboration between the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Newcastle, the Bristol Randomised Trials Collaboration, Avon & Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust and Northumberland Tyne & Wear NHS Trust.
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Seventy adults took part in the trial, and were randomised to treatment as usual or the intervention developed by the ADEPT team. The newly developed intervention was well received. The study findings were presented to the steering and data monitoring committees who have oversight of the trial. The findings are now being written up and the results will be made available as soon as possible.
The team hope to build on the promising findings and will apply for funding to run a larger-scale evaluation. The principal investigator, Ailsa Russell commented that “I have really enjoyed working as part of the ADEPT study, it has been a great collaboration between the participants and the collaborators from the different organisations involved. I am hopeful we will be able to carry on working in this area and find out more about what is most helpful for adults when they experience depression”.
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Read about CAAR's recently published research
Click on each title to find out more...
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Adapting Psychological Therapies for Autism is one of the most downloaded papers according to the website for the journal Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders. This paper reports the findings of a study surveying psychological therapists’ views and experience of adapting evidence based psychological therapy for autistic adults. The authors are planning to build on this work further by finding out if training can increase therapist confidence in this area.
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Compliance in Autism: Self-Report in Action. This study found that autistic adults were more compliant to requests made by others on both self-report and a behavioural task. These findings have important implications for a range of real-life settings including requests made in the context of research, schools, the criminal justice system, and the workplace.
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Mock Juror Perceptions of Child Witnesses on the Autism Spectrum: The Impact of Providing Diagnostic Labels and Information about Autism. Mock jurors were shown videos of one of two child witnesses on the autism spectrum being interviewed about a mock minor crime and were asked to rate how credible they viewed them to be as witnesses. Results demonstrated that providing jurors with generic information about autism and/or informing them of the child’s diagnostic label positively affected credibility ratings, but not for both children – highlighting the need for approaches tailored to individual children.
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CAAR was well-represented at this year’s International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) Annual Meeting in Rotterdam. Professor Mark Brosnan presented his work investigating jumping to conclusions and reasoning style and paranoia in autism (completed by Dr Kristina Bennert as part of her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology). Dr Ailsa Russell and Dr Kate Cooper presented initial findings (from interviews with participants in the RCT) from the ADEPT feasibility study (see above for more details). Dr Katie Maras presented findings showing how a novel specially developed interviewing technique is more effective for questioning autistic witnesses and victims than current police procedures.
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Dr Jade Norris presented ‘hot off the press’ findings at Autistica’s annual Autism Research Conference in September, showing the effectiveness of different questioning techniques in eliciting specific, detailed and relevant memories from autistic adults in police, healthcare and employment interviews.
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Members of CAAR and the Wales Autism Research Centre enjoy a drink on deck hosted by Dr Will Mandy at UCL, all part of the conference work.
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Visiting students and undergraduate research prizes
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Dr Chris Ashwin hosted students Alessandra Quadri, Federica Tizzoni, and Eleonora Brandas who were visiting the University of Bath from the University of Milano-Bicocca for an Erasmus-funded project over the summer months of 2018. Chris supervised their research project looking at moral reasoning and judgements about the facial and emotional attributes of others related to the degree of autism traits.
Chris Ashwin supervised Erasmus-funded student Valentina Nicolosi who was visiting the University of Bath from the University of Padua from February to July 2018, and was working on a research project (along with a University of Bath MRes student) investigating the effects of tDCS brain stimulation on the anterior STS region of the brain and eye gaze direction perception.
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Bath Psychology student Arron Mallinson-Pocock was awarded a prestigious Undergraduate Research Internship from the Institute for Mathematical Innovation at Bath for a project over summer 2018 supervised by Chris Ashwin developing methods for a computational modelling approach using fuzzy logic to model neural networks associated with mental illness. It is hoped the work done by Arron will lead to a methods paper published in a journal in the field.
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Our first ever CAAR placement student graduates with a First-Class Hons!
Proud congratulations go to Steph Calley on her recent graduation with a First Class BSc (Hons) in Psychology! Steph did a year-long placement at CAAR as part of her degree and is now Admissions Officer (Data and Analysis) at the University of Bath. Well done Steph!
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Welcome to new CAAR members!
CAAR are excited to be welcoming two new ESRC-funded PhD students in October. Ralph Bagnall will be starting a 1+3 studentship looking at interviewing police suspects with autism and Kate Precious will be carrying out a comparative analysis of autism-related policy in England and Denmark. We look forward to welcoming Ralph and Kate next month!
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