This project began as my undergraduate honors thesis. It considers how non-autistic college students’ interest in interacting with peers is impacted by the peers’ social behavior and special interests. You can read the first paper from this study in my Publications section!
This project is funded through UVA's Directors of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion small grants program and focuses on understanding how UVA could be more supportive of and accessible to autistic students.
This project focuses on understanding (1) what labels people with a connection to autism prefer and (2) how particular labels may contribute to or reduce the stigmatization of people who have a diagnosis of autism.
Background: Labeling an individual can influence the inferences others make about them. For example, using a face-inversion paradigm, Civile et al. (2018) found the difference between memory for upright vs. inverted faces was larger for faces labeled “regular people” than those labeled “diagnosed with autism.
Autistic people, by definition, differ in social behavior from non-autistic individuals. One characteristic common to many autistic people is a special interest in a particular topic—something spoken about with such frequency and intensity that it …