Marrus Natasha, Kennon-McGill Stefanie, Harris Brooke, Zhang Yi, Glowinski Anne L, Constantino John N
Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine.
Veteran's Administration Palo Alto Health Care System.
J Vis Exp. 2018 Mar 14(133):57041. doi: 10.3791/57041.
Reciprocal social behavior (RSB), an early-emerging capacity to engage in social contingency-which is foundational for both social learning and social competency-is hypothesized to be disrupted in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The ability to quantify the full range of RSB during the toddler period, when core symptoms of ASD often arise, is pivotal for evaluating early risk for ASD, characterizing social development, and tracking response to early interventions. However, important parameters of variation in RSB-especially prior to the development of verbal language-can be nuanced and difficult to characterize using questionnaire-based methods. To address this challenge, we developed a system for measuring quantitative variation in RSB in toddlers (ages 18 - 30 months) that incorporated not only standard questionnaire data from caregivers but also a novel set of video-referenced items, through which a respondent compares the behavior of a subject to that observed in a short video of a young child manifesting a highly competent level of social communication. Testing of this measure in a general population sample of twins confirmed that both the video-referenced items and the RSB Total Score (video-referenced items plus non-video-referenced items) displayed unimodal, continuous distributions, strong internal consistency, marked preservation of individual differences, and extremely high heritability. In addition, video-referenced items were particularly sensitive to quantifying incremental changes in social communication, a major element of RSB, over the course of early childhood development. Scores on the vrRSB clearly differentiated children with and without ASD and these data comprise an initial validation of this promising method for quantifying early RSB-cross-sectionally, over time, and as a function of early intervention.
互惠社交行为（RSB）是一种早期出现的参与社会应急的能力，这是社会学习和社会能力的基础，据推测在自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）中会受到干扰。在幼儿期（ASD的核心症状通常在此期间出现）量化RSB的全部范围的能力，对于评估ASD的早期风险、描述社会发展以及跟踪对早期干预的反应至关重要。然而，RSB变化的重要参数，尤其是在语言发展之前，可能很细微，使用基于问卷的方法难以描述。为应对这一挑战，我们开发了一种测量幼儿（18 - 30个月）RSB定量变化的系统，该系统不仅纳入了来自照顾者的标准问卷数据，还纳入了一组新颖的视频参考项目，通过这些项目，受访者将受试者的行为与在一个表现出高度社交沟通能力水平的幼儿短视频中观察到的行为进行比较。在双胞胎的一般人群样本中对该测量方法进行测试证实，视频参考项目和RSB总分（视频参考项目加非视频参考项目）均呈现单峰、连续分布，具有很强的内部一致性，显著保留了个体差异，并且遗传度极高。此外，视频参考项目在量化幼儿期社会沟通（RSB的一个主要元素）的增量变化方面特别敏感。vrRSB得分清楚地区分了有无ASD的儿童，这些数据构成了对这种有前景的方法的初步验证，该方法可用于横断面、随时间以及作为早期干预函数来量化早期RSB。
