Deictic Relational Responding and Perspective-Taking in Autistic Individuals: A Scoping Review

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

Abstract

Perspective-taking skills are crucial for successful social interactions and some autistic individuals seem to demonstrate great difficulty in this area. The concept continues to generate clinical and research interest across mainstream psychology and within behavior analysis. Within behavior analysis, relational frame theorists have argued that deictic relational responding is critically involved in perspective taking. We conducted a systematic search of the behavior analytic studies on deictic relational responding and perspective-taking in autistic individuals to highlight methods used to test perspective-taking and deictic relations, methods to train these if deficits were observed, and evidence for a relationship between deictic relational responding and perspective-taking. Seven studies met inclusion criteria and we conducted a descriptive analysis of these studies. We found some variation in the methods used to test and train perspective-taking through deictic relations. Only three of the studies attempted to demonstrate a link between deictic relational responding and perspective-taking. Overall, our review highlighted a need for more research into deictic relational responding and perspective-taking in autistic individuals, and we discussed specific areas for future research.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)107-137
Number of pages31
JournalPerspectives on Behavior Science
Volume47
Issue number1
Early online date6 Feb 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished online - 6 Feb 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Association for Behavior Analysis International 2024. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Keywords

  • Deictic relational responding
  • Perspective-taking
  • Relational frame theory
  • Verbal language development
  • Autism

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