Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social interaction and communication, with restricted interests, activity and behaviors. ASD is highly familial, indicating that genetic background strongly contributes to the development of this condition. However, only a fraction of the total number of genes thought to be associated with the condition have been discovered. Moreover, other factors may play an important role in ASD onset. In fact, it has been shown that parental conditions and in utero and perinatal factors may contribute to ASD etiology. More recently, epigenetic changes, including DNA methylation and micro RNA alterations, have been associated with ASD and proposed as potential biomarkers. This review aims to provide a summary of the literature regarding ASD candidate genes, mainly focusing on synapse formation and functionality and relevant epigenetic and environmental aspects acting in concert to determine ASD onset.

Autisms Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are characterized by core symptoms (social communication and restricted and repetitive behaviors) and related comorbidities, including sensory anomalies, feeding issues, and challenging behaviors. Children with ASD experience significantly more feeding problems than their peers. In fact, parents and clinicians have to manage daily the burden of various dysfunctional behaviors of children at mealtimes (food refusal, limited variety of food, single food intake, or liquid diet). These dysfunctional behaviors at mealtime depend on different factors that are either medical/sensorial or behavioral. Consequently, a correct assessment is necessary in order to program an effective clinical intervention. The aim of this study is to provide clinicians with a guideline regarding food selectivity concerning possible explanations of the phenomenon, along with a direct/indirect assessment gathering detailed and useful information about target feeding behaviors. Finally, a description of evidence-based sensorial and behavioral strategies useful also for parent-mediated intervention is reported addressing food selectivity in children with ASD.

Little is known about the effectiveness of pharmacological interventions on autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is a systematic review of the randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of oxytocin interventions in autism, made from January 1990 to September 2013. A search of computerized databases was supplemented by manual search in the bibliographies of key publications. The methodological quality of the studies included in the review was evaluated independently by two researchers, according to a set of formal criteria. Discrepancies in scoring were resolved through discussion. The review yielded seven RCTs, including 101 subjects with ASD (males=95) and 8 males with Fragile X syndrome. The main categories of target symptoms tested in the studies were repetitive behaviors, eye gaze, and emotion recognition. The studies had a medium to high risk of bias. Most studies had small samples (median=15). All the studies but one reported statistically significant between-group differences on at least one outcome variable. Most findings were characterized by medium effect size. Only one study had evidence that the improvement in emotion recognition was maintained after 6 weeks of treatment with intranasal oxytocin. Overall, oxytocin was well tolerated and side effects, when present, were generally rated as mild; however, restlessness, increased irritability, and increased energy occurred more often under oxytocin. RCTs of oxytocin interventions in autism yielded potentially promising findings in measures of emotion recognition and eye gaze, which are impaired early in the course of the ASD condition and might disrupt social skills learning in developing children. There is a need for larger, more methodologically rigorous RCTs in this area. Future studies should be better powered to estimate outcomes with medium to low effect size, and should try to enroll female participants, who were rarely considered in previous studies. Risk of bias should be minimized. Human long-term administration studies are necessary before clinical recommendations can be made.

The research reports on a study investigating the cognitive benefits of bilingualism in children who speak the minority languages of Sardinian and Scottish Gaelic, in addition to their respective ‘national’ languages of Italian and English. One hundred and twenty-one children, both bilingual and monolingual, were administered a series of standardised cognitive ability tests targeted at the four areas that have been previously shown to be advantageous to bilingual children in the literature, namely, cognitive control, problem-solving ability, metalinguistic awareness and working memory. The bilingual children significantly outperformed the monolingual children in two of the four sub-tests, and the Scottish children significantly outperformed the Sardinian children in one of the sub-tests. The differences found were largely due to the superior performance of the Scottish bilingual children who receive a formal bilingual education, in contrast to the Sardinian bilingual children who mostly only speak the minority language at home. The implications of the results are discussed.

This paper adds to the growing research on moral judgment by considering whether Theory of Mind (ToM) might foster children's autonomous moral judgment achievement. A group of 30 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) was compared in moral judgment (MJ) and ToM with 30 typically developing (TD) children. Participants were tested for moral judgment with a classical Piaget’s task and for ToM with a second order False Belief task. In the moral task, children were told two versions of a story: in one version the protagonist acted according to a moral intention but the action resulted in a harmful consequence; in the other version the protagonist acted according to an immoral intention, but the action resulted in a harmless consequence. Children were asked which of the two protagonists was the “naughtier”. In line with previous studies, the results indicated that, while the majority of TD participants succeeded in the second order False Belief task, only few individuals with ASD showed intact perspective taking abilities. The analysis of the MJ in relation to ToM showed that children with ASD lacking ToM abilities judged guilty the protagonists of the two versions of the story in the moral task because both of them violated a moral rule or because they considered the consequences of the actions, ignoring any psychological information. These results indicate a heteronomous morality in individuals with ASD, based on the respect of learned moral rules and outcomes rather than others’ subjective states.