Melody Altschuler

University of Kentucky | UKY · Health Management & Policy

Translating research into practices and policies is necessary to effectively deliver health care and have a positive impact on society, particularly in helping professions where the goal is to help people live their best lives. However, the gap between research, practice, and policy in helping professions remains a problem that has yet to be solved...

Background The Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ) is a checklist for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly used in research and clinical practice. While the original validation study suggested that the SCQ was an accurate ASD screener with satisfactory sensitivity and specificity, subsequent studies have yielded mixed results, with some rev...

Background The Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ) is a screening checklist for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly used in research and clinical practice. While the original validation study suggested that the SCQ was an accurate ASD screener with satisfactory sensitivity and specificity, subsequent studies have yielded mixed results, wit...

Traditional categorical approaches to classifying personality disorders are limited in important ways, leading to a shift in the field to dimensional approaches to conceptualizing personality pathology. Different areas of psychology – personality, developmental, and psychopathology – can be leveraged to understand personality pathology by examining...

Intense interests are common in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and little research has characterized aspects of interests that are unique to or shared among children with and without ASD. We aimed to characterize interests in a sample of infants at high-familial-risk (HR) and low-familial-risk (LR) for ASD using a novel i...

The present study evaluates the test–retest reliability of six theory of mind (ToM) tasks that measured cognitive, affective, and spontaneous ToM in 7 to 11 year-old children with autism spectrum disorder. Our results revealed considerable variation in test–retest reliability depending on the type of ToM task, which ranged from poor to good with th...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SCZ) have overlapping symptomatology related to difficulties with social cognition. Yet, few studies have directly compared social cognition in ASD, SCZ, and typical development (TD). The current study examined individual differences in face recognition and its relation to affectiv...

Alexithymia-a trait associated with difficulties understanding one's own emotions-is theorized to stem from deficits in interoceptive awareness, or the ability to detect, accurately monitor, and regulate internal bodily processes. The present meta-analysis analyzed all studies that empirically examined the relationship between alexithymia and inter...

Negative priming provides one useful measure of attentional focus and cognitive control, requirements of most domains of life (driving, work, play, etc.). Until now, 2 types of negative priming have been identified: identity negative priming and location negative priming. These effects are of particular interest because individuals who have difficu...

The present study examined individual differences in theory of mind (ToM) among a group of 60 children (7-11 years-old) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and average intelligence. Using open-ended and structured tasks to measure affective ToM, cognitive ToM, and spontaneous social attribution, we explored the nature of ToM and assessed whether To...