The preoperative experience can cause significant anxiety for both pediatric patients and their parents in the lead up to a surgical procedure. Pediatric anxiety in a preoperative setting has been shown to have significant negative downstream effects on the clinical outcomes of children and the healthcare system as a whole. Studies have found that preoperative parental anxiety has significant negative effects on children, regarding anxiety and emotional response. Therefore, interventions for parental preoperative anxiety are important to reduce the child’s anxiety. This review provides a brief overview of a broad range of strategies used to alleviate parental anxiety in a preoperative setting. Preoperative education, play-based interventions, music therapy, the presence of parents at induction of anesthesia, and integrative preoperative preparation programs have all demonstrated some evidence for reducing parental preoperative anxiety. The ultimate goal of using interventions for parental preoperative anxiety is to equip healthcare systems to better support families and optimize the perioperative outcomes of children.

Explaining individual differences in vocabulary in autism is critical, as understanding and using words to communicate are key predictors of long-term outcomes for autistic individuals. Differences in audiovisual speech processing may explain variability in vocabulary in autism. The efficiency of audiovisual speech processing can be indexed via amplitude suppression, wherein the amplitude of the event-related potential (ERP) is reduced at the P2 component in response to audiovisual speech compared to auditory-only speech. This study used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure P2 amplitudes in response to auditory-only and audiovisual speech and norm-referenced, standardized assessments to measure vocabulary in 25 autistic and 25 nonautistic children to determine whether amplitude suppression (a) differs or (b) explains variability in vocabulary in autistic and nonautistic children. A series of regression analyses evaluated associations between amplitude suppression and vocabulary scores. Both groups demonstrated P2 amplitude suppression, on average, in response to audiovisual speech relative to auditory-only speech. Between-group differences in mean amplitude suppression were nonsignificant. Individual differences in amplitude suppression were positively associated with expressive vocabulary through receptive vocabulary, as evidenced by a significant indirect effect observed across groups. The results suggest that efficiency of audiovisual speech processing may explain variance in vocabulary in autism.

Autistic children show reduced multisensory integration of audiovisual speech stimuli in response to the McGurk illusion. Previously, it has been shown that adults can integrate sung McGurk tokens. These sung speech tokens offer more salient visual and auditory cues, in comparison to the spoken tokens, which may increase the identification and integration of visual speech cues in autistic children. Forty participants (20 autism, 20 non-autistic peers) aged 7–14 completed the study. Participants were presented with speech tokens in four modalities: auditory-only, visual-only, congruent audiovisual, and incongruent audiovisual (i.e., McGurk; auditory ‘ba’ and visual ‘ga’). Tokens were also presented in two formats: spoken and sung. Participants indicated what they perceived via a four-button response box (i.e., ‘ba’, ‘ga’, ‘da’, or ‘tha’). Accuracies and perception of the McGurk illusion were calculated for each modality and format. Analysis of visual-only identification indicated a significant main effect of format, whereby participants were more accurate in sung versus spoken trials, but no significant main effect of group or interaction effect. Analysis of the McGurk trials indicated no significant main effect of format or group and no significant interaction effect. Sung speech tokens improved identification of visual speech cues, but did not boost the integration of visual cues with heard speech across groups. Additional work is needed to determine what properties of spoken speech contributed to the observed improvement in visual accuracy and to evaluate whether more prolonged exposure to sung speech may yield effects on multisensory integration.

Differences in audiovisual processing may influence language development in autism. We characterized preferential looking to temporally synchronous audiovisual speech in fifty infants (28 elevated‐likelihood [54% male]; 22 population‐level‐likelihood [50% male]) aged 12–18 months. We first tested whether preferential looking to synchronous audiovisual speech differed between groups; population‐level‐likelihood infants demonstrated greater preferential looking to synchronous audiovisual speech relative to elevated‐likelihood infants by 18 months. We then assessed whether preferential looking to synchronous audiovisual speech was related to concurrent expressive language (1) directly, (2) via vocalization complexity, and (3) as moderated by age, sex, and familial likelihood group. Infants completed an eye tracking task and standardized communication and language assessments at 12–18 months. The population‐level‐likelihood infants demonstrated greater preferential looking to synchronous audiovisual speech relative to elevated‐likelihood infants by 18 months. Preferential looking to synchronous audiovisual speech was not directly and unconditionally associated with concurrent expressive language. However, moderation and mediation analyses showed that preferential looking to synchronous audiovisual speech was significantly associated with concurrent expressive language through increased vocalization complexity in male infants. Implications for research, theory, and clinical practice are discussed.