A. Bentenuto

• Doctor of Psychology
• Faculty Member at University of Trento

Background/Objectives: The literature highlights the importance of parental involvement in autism treatment. However, much research has predominantly focused on child outcomes and cognitive dimensions. This study explores the impact of an early intensive intervention with parental involvement, focusing on changes in parents’ affective exchanges. No...

Diagnostic evaluations of neurodevelopmental disorders dramatically reduced and slowed down following the disruptions caused by Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. For this, it was necessary to identify solutions allowing diagnostic assessment, screening, and early patient care by implementing remote diagnostic protocols respecting the restrictions imposed by the...

Introduction Verbal language is one of the most immediate and significant means parents have to express affect and information to their children. Parental speech directed to children has been thoroughly examined in typical development. However, the characteristics of parental speech directed to children with neurodevelopmental disorders are far les...

BACKGROUND Virtual Reality (VR) adventure games can offer ideal technological solutions for training social skills in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), leveraging on their support to multisensory and multiplayer interactions over distance which may lower barriers to training access and increase user motivation. However, the design of...

Background Virtual reality (VR) adventure games can offer ideal technological solutions for training social skills in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), leveraging their support for multisensory and multiplayer interactions over distance, which may lower barriers to training access and increase user motivation. However, the design of...

The COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked interest in telehealth methods to guarantee the continuity of care of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Store-and-forward telehealth approaches offer the opportunity to facilitate timely screening of ASD, allowing parents to record videos of their child’s behaviors, subsequently shared with clinici...

Background: Identifying mechanisms of change in Autism treatment may help explain response variability and maximize efficacy. For this, the child-therapist interaction could have a key role as stressed by developmental models of intervention, but still remains under-investigated. Aims: The longitudinal study of treatment response trajectories co...

(1) Background: Children can develop cognitive and social skills during play. Most research has focused on mothers, but the paternal features in interaction with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are mainly unexplored. This study aimed to compare fathers’ and mothers’ interactive behaviors with their children with ASD to identify similar...

Background: Social robotics is a research field aimed at providing robots with skills related to social behavior and natural human interaction. Many studies have demonstrated the efficacy of these robots as socio-communicative mediators. Others have used them to create a new communication channel and promote social interaction in chil-dren with au...

Research during the COVID-19 pandemic has shown a strong relationship between child symptoms, parental stress, and mental health challenges. The pandemic has changed family routines, worsening child symptomatology and parental burden. The aim of this study was to investigate how the magnitude of the perceived changes in child externalizing behavior...

Given the influence of parents’ qualities and dyadic characteristics on child developmental outcomes, recent findings strengthened the importance of involving caregivers during the intervention to increase dyadic syntonization levels and to extend the acquisition of competencies in naturalistic contexts. The Intersubjectivity Parental-Based Interve...

Background Females with ASD tend to be under-recognized as they might present a different symptom manifestation, better social abilities, and masking behaviors. Since the main limitation of current literature on gender differences is represented by focusing on broad constructs, research needs to prioritize narrower constructs related to the subdoma...

The few studies available on quality of attachment in school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exclusively used questionnaires assessing explicit attachment representations. Thus, in the current study we assessed both explicit and implicit attachment representations in 23 children with ASD (without intellectual disability), 22 with l...

The feasibility of working on cognitive functions with children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) inside Multisensory Interactive Rooms (MIRs) has been poorly investigated, even if sensory atypicalities are common in ASD and usual intervention rooms could represent a challenging sensory setting for patients with ASD. We hypothesized t...

Background. Autism Spectrum Disorder is often associated with deficits in executive functions (EFs), which is contributing significantly to individuals with ASD’s difficulties in conducting an independent life, particularly considering social skills. Technologies offer promising opportunities to structure EF intervention programs for children on th...

Studies on parental interaction in the context of ASD has mainly focused on mothers, even if fathers and their children seem to form close and supportive relationships that may have unique effects on child development. Given the impact of ASD symptoms on a child’s ability to interact with significant others, recent findings strengthen the importanc...

Evidence of psychological distress in families during COVID‐19 outbreak are arising. However, the perceived changes in psychological adjustment during home confinement with respect to the period before the pandemic have not been addressed yet. Moreover, little is known about the role of coparenting and specific COVID‐19 contextual variables on pare...

Background Few studies have investigated the characteristics of father language directed to typically developing children (TD), and father speech directed to children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is largely under investigated. Considering the importance of involving fathers of children with ASD in research and clinical practice, the main pu...

Background: Observational research plays an important part in developmental research due to its noninvasiveness. However, it has been hardly applied to investigate efficacy of the child–therapist interaction in the context of naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBI). In particular, the characteristics of child–therapist interplay...

Research on the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted negative effects on the general population and particularly on parents. However, little is known about families of children with Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD). The present study investigated parental stress, coparenting, and child adjustment in Italian families with child...

(1) Background: Parental involvement during intervention with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been demonstrated to be fundamental for children’s developmental outcomes. However, most research focused on child gains especially considering cognitive functioning and symptoms severity, whereas parental and dyadic changes during interve...

Background Emotional availability (EA) is a dyadic relationship construct that can be considered an index of emotional quality of parent-child interaction. Using this construct, some research showed that both parent and child components of EA reflect key aspects of the parent-child relationship, but there are few studies that investigated these asp...

Background: Research highlights the positive effects of early intensive intervention with parent and school involvement for preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on general developmental outcomes and social skills in randomized controlled trials. However, given the inter-individual variability in the response to treatment, it is ne...

SYNOPSIS To develop a secure attachment, the quality of the mother’s relationship is fundamental, but now there is evidence that fathers equally play early and integrated roles in the development of the child, particularly in social and communicative skills. Hiraoka and colleagues emphasize father support in regulating maternal distress while liste...

A defective attention to faces and eyes characterizes autism spectrum disorder (ASD), however, the role of contingent information – such as the task instructions – remains still unclear. Our study aimed to investigate the face-orienting response and the subsequent attentive selection in the presence of varying task instructions in individuals with...

Background: Humans present a strong face-orienting response and a visual preference for faces from birth. Consistent evidence indicates that defective attention to faces and other humans characterizes Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Objectives: In our eye-tracking study, we aimed to investigate the face-orienting response and the subsequent attenti...

The purpose of the present study was to analyze mother-child collaborative play in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) compared to children with Down Syndrome (DS) and typical developing children (TD). Children with ASD are often described as having deficient play skills, particularly in the symbolic domain. Caregivers’ involvement in chi...

Attentional regulation and social cognition impairments have been reported in patients with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Particularly, attention allocation becomes problematic when a social content is presented. Nonetheless, contrasting results suggest that individual and contextual factors, due to stimulus and experimental setting, could play...

Background Synchrony is an essential component of interactive exchanges. In mother-infant interaction, synchrony underlies reciprocity and emotive regulation. A severe lack of synchrony is indeed a core issue within the communication and interaction deficit that characterizes autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in accordance with the DSM-5 classificat...

Background: The role of parents in the play development of typically and atypically developing children is a recurrent topic in the literature (Bornstein, Haynes, O’Reilly, & Painter, 1996; Bruner, 1975; Fiese 1990; Howes, Unger, & Matheson, 1992; Noll & Harding, 2003). There is compelling evidence that caregiver involvement in child play activitie...

Background: Parental speech directed to young children is crucial for many developmental reasons. For example, language is among the most immediate and relevant means parents have to convey both affect and information to children. Speech directed to children has been thoroughly investigated in typical development, and associations between parent sp...

Background: Parent-child interaction is as essential to the early develop ment of special needs children as it is for typically developing children. Although children with ASD have a specific deficit in social interaction, they can still profit from harmonious interactive exchanges to develop their potential. To date, however, mother-child inter...