¶ … social skills, internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia in Autism." It was authored by Neuhaus et al. In 2014. This journal article conducts original research to determine the relationship between Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to discern if there were any significant effects for social functioning and either internalizing or externalizing psychopathology symptoms. Significantly, the authors were able to ascertain that children with ASD had less parasympathetic cardiac control than those without this condition, which correlates to more difficulty in social situations for the former. The crux of understanding the research and the findings in this study pertains to the concept of RSA. RSA is widely understood as a means of assessing "lowered heart rate variability" (Neuhaus et al., 2014, p. 730). This fact is important in terms of social skills and the social development of children with ASD because it provides tangible evidence of the difficulty that they experience in social settings. In most social settings, children without ASD have higher rates of RSA which help to reflect their engagement in social interactions. The fact that children with ASD generate consistently lower rates of RSA -- both during social settings and even while at rest -- is indicative of the fact that there are definite physical components of this condition which play substantial roles in their ability to socialize and relate to others....

The authors (2014) denoted that "RSA correlates with a variety of social skills and behaviors, including social responsiveness, emotion recognition, peer engagement, spontaneous eye gazes, and receptive language" (p. 730).
The method deployed by the authors to determine the fact that those with ASD had lower rates of RSA than those without it was fairly simple. The parents of 18 children with ASD and 18 children without ASD were given a number of questionnaire instruments to evaluate their social capabilities. Additionally, these children were brought into a neutral site in which electrocardiographs were tested to determine their rates of RSA. The findings indicated that the rates of RSA were consistently lower for children with Autism, and that they also had more pronounced difficulty in social interactions than their counterparts (who functioned as controls) did. These data were processed through a regression model in order to determine these findings and their relationship to internalizing and externalizing psychopathology symptoms. The authors (2014) ascertained that "externalizing symptoms had a positive associate with RSA in our regression model" (p. 733).Thus, the methods of the authors were definitely solid and the article contained a brief yet informative literature. This article provides a viable means for individuals to learn about some of the physiological aspects of social issues plaguing children with ASD, and should be commended for that reason.

This article, then,…