Welcome Back to the FCP Workshops!
The Foundations Community Partnership, Spring workshop series will kick-off on March 5, 2014 with a workshop titled:
Understanding Social Skills Deficits in ASD: Implications for Treatment
The workshop will review the clinical manifestations of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), causes, and epidemiology. The focus will be on social difficulties in ASD, including deficits in discrete areas, such as social motivation, social perception (reading nonverbal cues), and social cognition (theory of mind or perspective taking). Restricted interests and co-occurring anxiety will be discussed in relationship to social difficulties, as will basic research on brain functions. Treatment approaches to social skill deficits will be described, including empirical evidence for specific approaches.
Workshop Objectives
At the end of this activity, the learner will be able to:
• Understand the core social deficits in autism spectrum and their heterogeneous manifestations
• Gain knowledge of the neurodevelopmental foundations and mechanisms for social difficulties
• Learn about novel treatment approaches to the social difficulties in ASD children and adolescents
Presenter: Robert Schultz, Ph.D., is Director, Center for Autism Research, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Professor of Psychology at Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Schultz joined the Yale faculty in 1994, rising to become the Harris Associate Professor of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. In 2007, Dr. Schultz moved to The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and became the director of the newly founded Center for Autism Research (CAR). He is the RAC Endowed Professor of Psychology in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and he holds a dual appointment with the Department of Psychiatry at Penn. He is the past President of the International Society for Autism Research and has served as the Associate Editor of the society’s journal, Autism Research. Dr. Schultz leads over a dozen autism research studies, focusing on risk factors and early prediction models, and he has been interviewed on PBS, CNN, National Public Radio, and CBS Evening News.
Please join the continuing conversation here after the workshop!
As usual, the Workshop will be held at the Health & Wellness Center Auditorium, 847 Easton Rd., Warrington, PA 18976 from 8:30 AM – 12:00 PM.
Great workshop! I really want to learn more about the peer-mediated classrooms that Dr. Schultz talked about. I emailed Jill Locke at Penn as he suggested and am hoping she’s not too swamped with her work to email me back with some links or attached articles. If anyone else has links or articles, I’d love to take a look!
Also, thinking about Dr. Schultz’ presentation, I started wondering about the attachments to horses that some of Special Equestrians’ ASD group participants develop. Do you think–Dr. Dan or anyone else out there–that there may be a special place for horses, or dogs, as change agents in experiential learning programs? … and I wonder whether Penn’s ARC group would feel that interaction between humans and equines could potentially jump start social motivation. hmmm.