Papers by Nicole Russo-Ponsaran
Journal of Mental Health Research in Intellectual Disabilities, Apr 3, 2014
Routledge eBooks, May 25, 2022
Social Development, Sep 27, 2022
Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2017
Body Background and Purpose Despite increasing consensus that social-emotional learning, or SEL, ... more Body Background and Purpose Despite increasing consensus that social-emotional learning, or SEL, is an important contributor to success in school and life, few tools are available for educators to assess SEL skill and to use assessment results to inform educational practice. In particular, there are no scalable, feasible, usable, and scientifically sound assessment systems that measure social-emotional comprehension, which includes mental processes enlisted to encode, interpret and reason about social and emotional information. Social-emotional comprehension includes the abilities to infer others emotions from nonverbal cues, to take others' perspectives, to solve social problems, and to enlist cognitive strategies involved in self-control. Well developed social-emotional comprehension is associated with success in school and life
Grantee Submission, 2019
Few tools are available to comprehensively describe the unique social-emotional skill profiles of... more Few tools are available to comprehensively describe the unique social-emotional skill profiles of youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study describes the usability, reliability, and validity of SELweb, a normed, web-based assessment designed to measure four core social-emotional domains, when used to measure these skills in a sample of 57 well-characterized youth with ASD (ages 6-10 years with IQ ≥ 80). SELweb measures facial emotion recognition, theory of mind, social problem solving, and self-control. SELweb was well tolerated and yielded scores with reliabilities comparable to those found in normative samples. SELweb scores showed good evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for three of the four skills it was designed to assess. Mean deficits were found for theory of mind, social problem solving, and self-control, whereas no mean deficits were found for emotion recognition. Individual profiles varied considerably, suggesting the sensitivity of SELweb to the within-and between-person individual differences among youth with ASD. Findings support the usefulness and accessibility of SELweb as a tool for measuring complex socialemotional skill profiles in youth with ASD.
Assessment, Sep 18, 2021
This article describes the development and validation of a shortened form of SELweb EE, a web-bas... more This article describes the development and validation of a shortened form of SELweb EE, a web-based assessment for social–emotional skills in the early elementary grades. Using a Rasch approach, in the first study, we used data from two archival data sets to reduce the number of items in three subtests to create short forms that maintained item fit, item difficulty, item discrimination, and test information function range. In the second study, we created and administered a short form of SELweb EE to a demographically diverse cross-validation sample of 22,683 students. We evaluated the shortened assessment subtests’ score reliability, fit to a hypothesized factor structure, and association with age and other variables to evaluate criterion-related validity. Findings from this study suggest that score reliabilities, factor structure, and criterion-related validity for the short form are similar to corresponding properties of the long form. In addition, using a confirmatory factor analysis framework, the short form of SELweb EE demonstrated evidence of configural, metric, and scalar invariance across sex, ethnicity, and language. Shortening SELweb EE reduced the mean administration duration from 36 to 24 minutes. This reduction substantially increases its usability and feasibility while maintaining its psychometric merit.
Social Development, Mar 19, 2021
Journal of Mental Health Research in Intellectual Disabilities, Apr 3, 2014
Neuron, Jan 7, 2018
The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) has launched SPARKForAutism.org, a dynam... more The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) has launched SPARKForAutism.org, a dynamic platform that is engaging thousands of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and connecting them to researchers. By making all data accessible, SPARK seeks to increase our understanding of ASD and accelerate new supports and treatments for ASD.
Background: Language impairment is a hallmark of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and prosody, rep... more Background: Language impairment is a hallmark of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and prosody, represented by pitch contour of speech, is particularly affected. Prior investigations of language representation in ASD have detected deficiencies in speech perception and cortical encoding, but information about lower (brainstem) level processing is lacking. The fidelity of brainstem transcription permits a link between the acoustic components of speech (e.g., consonants/vowels/pitch) with distinct aspects of the evoked response (e.g., timing/frequency information). Objectives: To determine whether the auditory brainstem responses to speech syllables in children with ASD differ in comparison with typically developing (TD) controls. Methods: Speech stimuli, including a consonant-vowel speech syllable /da/ and two fully voiced /ya/ syllables, with ascending and descending pitch contours, were delivered monaurally to the right ear to children (7-13 years) with ASD (N=21) and age- and IQ-matc...
Frontiers in Psychology, Feb 21, 2023
Background: Nonverbal accuracy, or the ability to infer others’ emotions from nonverbal cues such... more Background: Nonverbal accuracy, or the ability to infer others’ emotions from nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, is an important contributor to social success. In naturalistic settings, nonverbal cues are displayed quickly and change rapidly. However, the speed with which children encode nonverbal information about others’ emotions is an under-studied area. As yet, for example, it is unknown whether children with autism-spectrum disorders (ASDs) process nonverbal information at the same pace as their typically-developing (TD) peers. It is also unknown whether nonverbal processing speed explains a significant increment in the variance of children’s social functioning, over and above nonverbal accuracy. Objectives: The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between nonverbal accuracy, nonverbal processing speed, and social functioning among ASD and TD children. We hypothesize that ASD children will score lower on measures of nonverbal accuracy and process nonve...
Background: We currently have an incomplete understanding of the social-emotional processing impa... more Background: We currently have an incomplete understanding of the social-emotional processing impairments that give rise to social disability among children with autism-spectrum disorders (ASDs). Affect recognition, or the ability to infer others’ emotions from nonverbal cues, is an important contributor to social success and has been proposed as one of the deficits in ASD. Most studies have examined children’s ability to infer emotions from photographs of facial expressions. Although some studies find that children with ASDs have impaired affect recognition skills, other studies find no differences between children with ASDs and their typically-developing peers.Objectives: The objective of this study is to compare the ability of children with ASDs to recognize others’ emotions from four nonverbal channels (facial expression, tone of voice, posture, and gait) to that of their typically-developing peers. We hypothesize that averaged across nonverbal behavioral channels (faces, voices,...
Background: There is a well-articulated theoretical model for understanding social information pr... more Background: There is a well-articulated theoretical model for understanding social information processing (SIP; Crick & Dodge 1994, 1996). Most SIP assessments are vignette-based interviews that require significant training to administer and score. It is unclear how well interviews about social problems approximate the experience of being in the midst of a social problem. To advance science and practice, we are developing the Virtual Environment for Social Information Processing (VESIPTM), a computerized simulation in which children adopt the role of an avatar and use a game controller to navigate challenging social situations and engage in real-time social decision-making. Objectives: First, we tested the usability and feasibility of our prototype in typically-developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Our second objective was to show initial evidence that the VESIPTM is sensitive to diagnostic differences. Our overarching goal is to create a user-f...
Background: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) have elements of shared ... more Background: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) have elements of shared neurobiology. Individuals living with either condition suffer from severe language and social impairments. These impairments often manifest in distinctly different ways and may arise from different underlying origins. Objectives: This study aimed to identify similarities and differences in the ways children with ASD and FXS encode, interpret, and reason about social and emotional information. Our central objective was to compare social-emotional learning (SEL) skill in children with ASD and children with FXS and to determine diagnosis-specificity of patterns of deficits. Methods: SEL skill is a constellation of cognitive, affective, and regulatory processes that govern social behavior. We compared the SEL phenotype of children with ASD to girls with FXS. Autism diagnoses and severity were confirmed via the Social Communication Questionnaire and the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule....
Background: Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention deficit disorders (ADHD) ... more Background: Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention deficit disorders (ADHD) often experience significant social impairment and academic challenges. One contributing factor for some of these children is poor regulation of attention, behavior, and emotions (Barkley, 1998; Grossman, Klin, Carter, & Volkmar, 2000; Prizant, Wetherby, Rubin, & Laurent, 2003; Solomon, Goodlin-Jones, & Anders, 2004). Treatments aimed at improving self-regulation have been primarily cognitive and behavioral. Mindfulness is an intervention strategy that has been minimally studied as a means of helping children with self-regulation struggles, but may prove effective for clinical pediatric populations. Mindfulness is a meditative practice that increases awareness of one’s sensory experiences and thoughts, and focuses attention on the present moment (Allen, Blashki, & Gullone, 2006). It has been shown to effectively treat a range of medical and psychological conditions with adults, including...
Social Development, Sep 27, 2022
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Papers by Nicole Russo-Ponsaran