Abstract
The social behaviors of 14 autistic children and 14 normal children of equivalent mental age were observed during a free-play situation as well as during separation from and reunion with their mothers and a stranger. As a group, the autistic children showed evidence of attachment to their mothers, directing more social behaviors and more physical contact to their caregivers than to the stranger during the reunion episodes. Within the autistic group, the children who showed an increase in attachment behaviors in response to separation and reunion demonstrated more advanced symbolic play skills than those autistic children who showed no change in attachment behaviors. One possible explanation may be that autistic children require more advanced levels of symbolic ability to form attachments to others than is necessary for the development of attachments in normal children.
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Support for this research was provided by Biobehavioral Research Support Grant 516, Grant MH 33815, and NIMH Postdoctoral Fellowship 1 F32 MHO7550-01. Subjects were recruited from the UCLA Clinical Research Center for the Study of Childhood Psychosis, funded by NIMH Grant MH 30897. We thank members of the CRC, particularly Dr. Peter Tanguay, Dr. Barbara Fish, and Dr. B. J. Freeman, for their support of our research efforts. We also thank Mary Beth Sorensen for her assistance in data collection and analysis, Luisa Castillo for her help in preparation of the manuscript, and Dolores Adams for her assistance in data analysis. In addition, Brian Vaughn, Ph.D., Peter Mundy, Ph.D., and Tracy Sherman, Ph.D., contributed significantly to this project. Portions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, Washington, D.C., 1982.
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Sigman, M., Ungerer, J.A. Attachment behaviors in autistic children. J Autism Dev Disord 14, 231–244 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02409576
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02409576