Autism Spectrum, Attachment Styles, and Social Skills in University Student.docVIP

Creative Education 2013. Vol.4, No.8, 514-520 Published Online August 2013 in SciRes (/journal/ce) /10.4236/ce.2013.48075 Autism Spectrum, Attachment Styles, and Social Skills in University Student Junichi Takahashi , Koju Tamaki , Nozomi Yamawaki 1 2 3 Department of Developmental Disorders, National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Tokyo, Japan 1 2 Department Graduate School of Human Development and Culture, Fukushima University, Fukushima-Shi, Fukushima, Japan 3 Graduate School of Psychology and Human Development, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan Email: j_taka@ncnp.go.jp Received June 6 , 2013; revised July 6 , 2013; accepted July 13 , 2013 th th th Copyright ? 2013 Junichi Takahashi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Com- mons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, pro- vided the original work is properly cited. We investigated the relationships between Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores, adult attachment style (as assessed by the Internal Working Model [IWM] scale) scores, and social skills (as assessed by Kiku- chi’s Scale of Social Skills [KiSS-18]) in university students who had no diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (N = 468). The AQ consists of five subscales: social skills, local details, attention switching, communication, and imagination. The IWM is composed of three subscales: secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment styles. The KiSS-18 is a single-factor model. First, we calculated the correlations between AQ, IWM, and KiSS-18 scores. Next, we examined the differences in each subscale score of the IWM be- tween two groups defined by their AQ scores (High and Low AQ groups).