Meta-Analysis – Dr Martin Fracker

Do Autistic Individuals Gesture Less than Neurotypical Individuals?

When people try to communicate with others, they may use different types of gestures to make their meaning clear. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been thought to gesture less than others, but recent research suggests whether that is true depends on the type of gesture. Deictic gestures include actions such as pointing and reaching. Emblematic gestures communicate semantic meaning such as nodding the head to mean “yes” or shrugging the shoulders to mean “I don’t know.” Iconic gestures visually represent an object, action, or concept such as forming a circle with the hands to represent a ball, sliding a hand rapidly from left to right to indicate a car racing past, and so on.

Nicola McKern and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 31 articles comparing the gestures of over 700 ASD individuals to those of 860 neurotypical individuals. They found that autistic individuals do indeed exhibit fewer deictic and emblematic gestures than others, but that they do not generally differ from others in the production of iconic gestures.

These researchers believe the most important conclusion from their analysis is that we should not prematurely rule out a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder simply because a person gestures normally to communicate.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy is the Best Intervention for Social Anxiety Disorder

Mayo-Wilson and colleagues performed a meta-analysis across 41 interventions for patients with social anxiety disorder including cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, psychopharmacological therapy, and others. Based on the results from 101 clinical trials including over 13,000 participants, including various control groups, they concluded that cognitive-behavior therapy was best for most patients. For patients for whom cognitive-behavior therapy was not appropriate, they recommended psychopharmacological therapy as the next best treatment.

Noisy Data Makes Comparisons of Psychotherapies More Challenging

In this article, David Tolin looks at why some studies do not find cognitive-behavior therapies to be better than other forms of therapy. He identifies several sources of error variance (in other words, noisy data) that may hide any differences between the effectiveness of candidate psychotherapies. He then suggests ways to improve comparisons of such psychotherapeutic evaluations.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy Works Better than Other Psychotherapies

David Tolin has spent years comparing the effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapies to other forms of psychotherapy. In this article, he publishes the results of a meta-analytic review across 26 other studies. (You can learn more about meta-analysis from the Association for Psychological Science website.) His basic finding was that cognitive behavior therapy was more effective than other forms of therapy in treating patients with anxiety and depression disorders.