Matthew D Lerner

Stony Brook University | Stony Brook · Department of Psychology

Background: There are no well-established measures of group cohesion, defined as the collaborative bond between group members, in group cognitive behavioral therapy (GCBT) with youth. We therefore examined the Therapy Process Observational Coding System for Child Psychotherapy-Group Cohesion Scale (TPOCS-GC), which has previously only been used wi...

ARTICLE FREE TO ACCESS AT: https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2022.2158842. In this editorial statement, we briefly delineated a series of observations, guidelines, and directions for future research focused on the most common outcome of multi-informant assessments of youth mental health. Discrepancies commonly occur between estimates of youth mental...

Background: Improving the understanding and treatment of mental health concerns, including depression and anxiety, are significant priorities for autistic adults. While several theories have been proposed to explain the high prevalence of internalizing symptoms in autistic populations, little longitudinal research has been done to investigate poten...

Researchers strategically assess youth mental health by soliciting reports from multiple informants. Typically, these informants (e.g., parents, teachers, youth themselves) vary in the social contexts where they observe youth. Decades of research reveal that the most common data conditions produced with this approach consist of discrepancies across...

Objective Research about autism spectrum disorder (ASD) supports variation in symptom presentations across settings, and there is a growing literature that explicates how this variability may improve characterization of the autism phenotype. Capitalizing on a well-established literature on informant discrepancy as an index of contextual variability...

While social difficulties in autism are well‐established, questions remain regarding whether these represent challenges in acquiring or performing such skills, reduced social strengths, or a unique distribution across these domains (i.e., social profile). This study empirically derived social profiles of 211 autistic and non‐autistic youth (Mage =...

The present study examined the extent to which autism symptoms relate to anxiety, depression, and AD + in autistic youth. Anxiety and depression symptoms were measured using a DSM rating scale. A CFA of the DSM model of anxiety and depression symptoms showed inadequate fit. An EFA of anxiety, depression symptoms supported a model with three factors...

Social skills interventions (SSIs) are commonly used to improve social functioning in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which is a condition characterized by differences in social cognition and social communication. Although more traditional SSIs have used knowledge-based, didactic instruction, recent research has explored the utility of p...

Group social skills interventions (GSSIs) are among the most commonly used treatments for improving social competence in youth with ASD, however, results remain variable. The current study examined predictors of treatment response to an empirically-supported GSSI for youth with ASD delivered in the community (Ntotal=75). Participants completed a co...

Objective To examine patterns and predictors of familiarity with transdisciplinary psychosocial (e.g., non-pharmacologic) practices for practitioners treating youths with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the United States.Method Practitioners (n = 701) from behavioral, education, medical, and mental health backgrounds who worked with youth (ages 7...

Brief and low intensity (LI) interventions are a relatively new approach to delivering evidence-based psychological treatments for adults presenting with common mental health problems, and an even newer approach for working with children and young people. Over recent years, empirically validated brief and LI psychological treatments for children an...

Lay abstract: School-age children, adolescents, and young adults with autism spectrum disorder encounter many different types of providers in their pursuit of treatment for anxiety, behavior problems, and social difficulties. These providers may all be familiar with different types of intervention practices. However, research has not yet investiga...

While long described in anecdotal accounts of the lived experiences of autistic individuals, the phenomenon of behaving in ways that appear inconsistent with the presence of autism (or passing as non-autistic; PAN) has recently seen a dramatic increase in scrutiny in the published scientific literature. Increased research attention has coincided wi...

Current models on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) have shown an evident and quantified lack of reliability for measuring feature-relevance when statistically entangled features are proposed for training deep classifiers. There has been an increase in the application of Deep Learning in clinical trials to predict early diagnosis of neuro-d...

Online survey research has significantly increased in popularity in recent years. With its use, researchers have a new set of concerns about data collection and analysis to consider, including the possibility of fraudulent survey submissions. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate to survey researchers an innovative and systematized process...

While long described in anecdotal accounts of the lived experiences of autistic individuals, the phenomenon of behaving in ways that appear inconsistent with the presence of autism (or passing as non-autistic; PAN) has recently seen a dramatic increase in scrutiny in the published scientific literature. Increased research attention has coincided wi...

Machine learning methods, such as deep learning, show promising results in the medical domain. However, the lack of interpretability of these algorithms may hinder their applicability to medical decision support systems. This paper studies an interpretable deep learning technique, called SincNet. SincNet is a convolutional neural network that effic...

Machine learning methods, such as deep learning, show promising results in the medical domain. However, the lack of interpretability of these algorithms may hinder their applicability to medical decision support systems. This paper studies an interpretable deep learning technique, called SincNet. SincNet is a convolutional neural network that effic...

Impairments in theory of mind (ToM)—long considered common among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—are in fact highly heterogeneous across this population. Although such heterogeneity should be reflected in differential recruitment of neural mechanisms during ToM reasoning, no research has yet uncovered a mechanism that explains these...

Purpose of Review While there has been sustained interest in understanding the role of reward processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), researchers are just beginning to focus on the anticipation phase of reward processing in this population. This review aimed to briefly summarize recent advancements in functional imaging studies of anticipator...

During the last 40 years, neuroscience has become one of the most central and most productive approaches to investigating autism. In this commentary, we assemble a group of established investigators and trainees to review key advances and anticipated developments in neuroscience research across five modalities most commonly employed in autism resea...

Background: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit frequent behavioral deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER). It remains unknown whether these deficits arise because facial emotion information is not encoded in their neural signal, or because it is encoded, but fails to translate to FER behavior (deployment). This distincti...

Camouflaging refers to behavioral adaptations that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially females, use to mask symptoms during social situations. Compensation is a component of camouflaging in which an individual's observed behavior is considerably better than actual ability. The study explored diagnostic, sex‐based, and compen...

Models of impaired social competence in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) highlight deficits in social cognition and social behavior. The Contextual Assessment of Social Skills (CASS) is a laboratory‐based assessment of conversation ability in which participants interact with trained confederates who act interested (CASS‐I) and bored (CASS‐B), sequent...

Atypical communication characteristics (ACCs), such as speech delay, odd pitch, and pragmatic difficulties, are common features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as are the symptoms of a wide range of psychiatric disorders. Using a simple retrospective method, this study aimed to better understand the relation and stability of ACCs with a broad ran...

Atypical social communication is a key indicator of autism spectrum disorder and has long been presumed to interfere with friendship formation and first impressions among typically developing youth. However, emerging literature suggests that such atypicalities may function differently among groups of peers with autism spectrum disorder. The current...

A common interpretation of the face-processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that they arise from a failure to develop normative levels of perceptual expertise. One indicator of perceptual expertise for faces is the own-age bias, operationalized as a processing advantage for faces of one's own age, presumably due to mor...

Lay abstract: Difficulties with social communication and interaction are a hallmark feature of autism spectrum disorder. These difficulties may be the result of problems with explicit social cognition (effortful and largely conscious processes) such as learning and recalling social norms or rules. Alternatively, social deficits may stem from probl...

Background As youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often experience social difficulties but report wanting to be more well-liked and have more friends, it is important to understand beliefs that youth with ASD hold that may influence their peer relations. This study examined youths’ beliefs regarding their own social skills in relation to thei...

Although the alliance is a consistent predictor of treatment outcomes in psychosocial intervention, few studies have examined this association among youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In particular, youth-therapist alliance has never been examined in social skills interventions (SSI), a common modality for this population. In this study, th...

Lay abstract: Youth with autism spectrum disorder often exhibit symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder; however, it can be difficult for parents and clinicians to tell the difference between the restricted and repetitive behaviors often seen in autism spectrum disorder and symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. This difficulty in distinguis...

Employment rates for autistic individuals are poor, even compared to those from other disability groups. Internationally, there remains limited understanding of the factors influencing employment across the stages of preparing for, gaining, and maintaining employment. This is the third in a series of studies conducted as part of an International So...

Objective: This meta-analysis advances a framework to understand correspondence among units of analysis of the social processing construct within Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). Method: As requested for this special issue, eligible studies cited an RDoC-initiative paper or mentioned RDoC in the abstract, title, or keywords were empirical and pe...

Despite evidence suggesting differences in early event-related potential (ERP) responses to social emotional stimuli, little is known about later stage ERP contributions to social emotional processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Adults with and without ASD completed a facial emotion recognition task involving stimuli that va...

We write to respond to an erudite letter to the editor by Zachary J. Williams.¹ that extended analyses presented in our recent publication² investigating the latent structure of autism phenotypic symptoms. The letter by Williams reported results of a bifactor analysis using the standardized loadings and interfactor correlations derived from a Schmi...

Understanding whether the co‐occurrence of psychiatric symptoms within autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are specific to the ASD diagnosis or reflect similar higher‐order patterns observed in both ASD and non‐ASD samples, or a confluence of the two, is of critical importance. If similar, it would suggest that comorbid psychiatric conditions among indi...

Objective: This meta-analysis advances a framework to understand correspondence among units of analysis of the social processing construct within Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). Method: As requested for this special issue, eligible studies cited an RDoC-initiative paper or mentioned RDoC in the abstract, title or keywords, were empirical and peer-...

Youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience deficits in social knowledge. It has long been theorized that these youth must learn these skills explicitly, and social skills interventions (SSIs) have followed suit. Recently, performance-based SSIs have emerged, which promote in vivo opportunities for social engagement without explicit instru...

Objective: While much is known about the quality of social behavior among neurotypical individuals and those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), little work has evaluated quantity of social interactions. This study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to quantify in vivo daily patterns of social interaction in adults as a function of demogr...

This commentary highlights the observation that social motivation is usually an imprecisely specified construct. We suggest four social motivation conceptualizations across levels of analysis and explore where the target article situates among these. We then offer theoretical and practical guidance for operationalization and measurement of social m...

Despite efforts to improve employment outcomes for autistic individuals, internationally their employment rates remain low. There is a need to better understand the factors influencing successful employment for autistic adults in the labor market from the perspectives of multiple key stakeholders. This study represents the second in a series of pap...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. In the heading “Data Analytic Plan”, under “Level 2” the following equations were published incorrectly. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

Attempts to understand subjectivity have historically involved distinguishing the strengths of subjective methods (e.g., survey ratings from informants) from those of alternative methods (e.g., observational/performance-based tasks). Yet, a movement is underway in Psychology that considers the merits of intersubjectivity: Understanding the space be...

Using a cross-sectional survey of 673 multidisciplinary autism spectrum disorder providers recruited from five different sites in the United States, we examined the frequency with which community-based providers inquire about, screen, and treat trauma-related symptoms in their patients/students and assessed their perceptions regarding the need for...

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 sam...

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have a high degree of comorbidity but differential etiology (Leitner, 2014). Previous studies reported deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER) associated with poorer social functioning (Høyland et al., 2017; Kats-Gold, 2007) in both ASD (Lozier et al...

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) evince deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER; Lozier et al., 2014). However, it is unclear if these deficits result from a failure to encode FER, or to deploy correctly-encoded information in making FER judgements (Yang et. al 2018). Deep-learning methodologies, such as Deep Convolutional Neural...

There are two established electroencephalogram (EEG) indices that putatively relate to anxiety symptoms: a) the error-related negativity (ERN), which reflects endogenous threat sensitivity, and b) resting-state EEG relative right frontal activity (rRFA), which relates to approach/withdrawal motivation. We examined these indices conjointly to better...

Supportive school services are a primary service modality for youth with autism spectrum disorder. Autism spectrum disorder, as well as co-occurring psychiatric symptoms and low intellectual abilities, interfere with academic achievement and therefore influence decisions about school services. Therefore, we examined the association of parent, teach...

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are both neurodevelopmental disorders originating in childhood with high associated impairments and public health significance. There has been growing recognition of the frequent co-occurrence, and potential interrelatedness, between ADHD and ASD without intellectual...

This study compared atypical communication characteristics (ACCs) in clinic-referred youth with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD), identified subgroups based on different patterns of ACCs in youth with ASD, and determined if ACC subgroups result in meaningful clinical phenotypes in their relation to psychopathology and functional outcomes....

A key component of delivering mental health services involves evaluating psychosocial impairments linked to mental health concerns. Youth may experience these impairments in various ways (e.g., dysfunctional family and/or peer relationships, poor school performance). Importantly, youth may display symptoms of mental illness without co-occurring psy...

We write to respond to an erudite letter-to-the-editor that extended analyses presented in our recent publication investigating the latent structure of autism phenotypic symptoms.1 That letter reported results of a bifactor analysis using the standardized loadings and inter-factor correlations derived from a Schmid-Leiman orthogonalization of the o...

Youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience high rates of psychiatric symptoms, but the relation between verbal ability and psychiatric symptoms is unknown. This study utilized a large sample of clinically referred inpatient and outpatient youth with ASD to compare psychiatric comorbidity between verbal and minimally-verbal youth, adjustin...

Objective: The two primary – seemingly contradictory – strategies for classifying child psychiatric syndromes are categorical and dimensional; conceptual ambiguities appear to be greatest for polythetic syndromes such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recently, a compelling alternative has emerged that integrates both categorical and dimensional a...

The aim of this study is to holistically synthesise the extent and range of literature relating to the employment of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Database searches of Medline, CINAHL, PsychINFO, Scopus, ERIC, Web of Science and EMBASE were conducted. Studies describing adults with autism spectrum disorder employed in competitive, supp...

Error-related potentials are considered an important neuro-correlate for monitoring human intentionality in decision-making, human-human, or human-machine interaction scenarios. Multiple methods have been proposed in order to improve the recognition of human intentions. Moreover, current brain-computer interfaces are limited in the identification o...

Exploring the performance of a novel EEG single trial emotion classification pipeline in TD and ASD groups can advance understanding of both functional network-activation and of emotion reappraisal in individuals with ASD relative to TD peers

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at increased risk for experiencing one or more co-occurring psychiatric conditions. When present, these conditions are associated with additional impairment and distress. It is therefore crucial that clinicians and researchers adequately understand and address these challenges. However, due to sym...

The potential clinical needs of typically developing (TD) siblings of youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain disputed. A total of 239 mothers of youth aged 6–17, including one youth with ASD (M = 11.14 years; simplex families) and at least one other youth (M = 11.74 years) completed online standardized measures of various familial factors...

Understanding usual care is important to reduce health disparities and improve the dissemination of evidence-based practices for youth (ages 7–22 years) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A barrier to describing “usual ASD care” is the lack of a common vocabulary and inventory of the practices used by a diverse provider field. To address this bar...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience characteristic social and communicative challenges while also representing a wide range of abilities. A plurality of children with ASD exhibit average to exceptional intellectual capacity; they are often considered to be twice exceptional inasmuch as they often exhibit deep knowledge of sp...

Anxiety is one of the most common presenting problems for youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and causes greater impairment than the symptoms of ASD alone. Despite the increased risk for anxiety disorders in ASD, there is limited research on the assessment of anxiety in this population, relative to the large body of literature on anxiety in t...

Objective: We examined whether motivation and treatment credibility predicted alliance in a 10-session cognitive behavioral treatment delivered in community clinics for youth anxiety disorders. Method: Ninety-one clinic-referred youths (meanage = 11.4 years, standard deviation = 2.1, range 8-15 years, 49.5% boys) with anxiety disorders-rated tre...

Lay summary: The error-related negativity (ERN) is a physiological measure of the brain's response to errors which is thought to reflect threat sensitivity and has been implicated in anxiety disorders in individuals without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study revealed that the ERN is related to social anxiety symptoms, specifically p...

Previous investigations have explored stress and pubertal hormones in parallel; it has been a recent development, however, to explore the relationships between different hormones during puberty, and how this hormonal cross-talk may be influenced by the environment. The current study investigated neuroendocrine coupling, or the extent to which hormo...

Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with impaired face processing. The N170 event-related potential (ERP) has been considered a promising neural marker of this impairment. However, no quantitative review to date has integrated the literature to assess whether the N170 response to faces in individuals with ASD differs from that o...

Pretense is a naturally occurring, apparently universal activity for typically developing children. Yet its function and effects remain unclear. One theorized possibility is that pretense activities, such as dramatic pretend play games, are a possible causal path to improve children's emotional development. Social and emotional skills, particularly...

Repetitive cognition, including rumination such as that seen in depression, has been shown to correlate with depression symptoms in both typically developing individuals and individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Repetitive cognition is more common in autism spectrum disorder than in typically developing peers, as is depression; thus, this stud...