EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP OF MIND SKILLS AND SOCIAL SKILLS WITH AUTISTIC TRAITS AMONG DIAGNOSED CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER (ASD)

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is considered as a neurodevelopmental clause that characterized by constant difficulties in social, mental, communicational, or repetitive behavior aspects of the child. The children who are diagnosed with this disorder usually report a very heterogeneous rang of symptoms with unstable range of severity. The core purpose of this study was not only highlighting the deficit skills of autistic children but also endeavor to check the possible relationship of these deficit skills with autistic traits of the children. For that purpose, a sample of (N=30) diagnosed children with autism was selected from two autism centre i.e., Autism Resource Centre & Special Need Care Centre in Multan by using the purposive sampling technique. To collect the responses of the autistic children three valid and reliable measures were utilized. The Mind Task Battery was used to check the mind skills of the children; Social Skills Scale (SSS) was applied to check the social competency and Social Responsive Scale (SRS) was administered to check the autistic traits. The collected data was analyzed by using SPSS. The results from the collected data revealed that the autistic traits were higher among the children and these traits were significantly correlated with the mind skills of the children. Furthermore, the results reported that the children exhibit frequent repetitive behavior, low level of advance and basic skills and lower level of self-control. Hence, from the results it concluded that there is a dire need to address problems of autistic children and provide some intervention to improve these anomalies. Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Social Skills, Mind Skills, Autistic Traits.