TestsTools/ Critique-Autism Spectrum Disorder - Essay Example

Symptoms of autism range from severe to mild manifestations that include intellectual disability, seizures, anxiety, sleep cycle and sensory disturbances. Motor abnormalities, immune dysfunction and gastrointestinal problems are also other symptoms associated with autism in children (Acton, 2012). There have been correlations of Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) due to a possible comorbidity between the two conditions. ADHD is characterized by difficulties in staying focused and controlling behavior and hyperactivity.

Yerys et al. (2013) conducted a research study to investigate the separate components of emotional go/no-go performance relate to autism versus attention symptoms in children with autism. This paper seeks to provide a critique of the tests and tools used to conduct this research study. The aim of the research study was to establish the relationship between ASD and ADHD in the ability to coordinate cognitive processes to accomplish a goal. This was achieved by examining whether ADHD and ASD symptoms make any independent contributions to cognitive control performance in social contexts (Yerys et al., 2013). The experiment used ASD and ADHD as the independent variables (IV) in the experiment while response inhibition was used as the dependent variable (DV).

The test tool, used in this research study, was an emotional go / no-go tasks of fearful, sad, happy and angry. The experiment involved 21 test participants who satisfied the criteria for autism and 23 participants were used as the typically developing controls (Yerys et al., 2013). The four variables of the test were go stimulus that were meant to elicit a response and a neutral facial expression was the no-go stimulus. The no-go stimulus was the one that was going to be used to measure the test ad control groups’ response inhibition.

The tests were administered in a multidirectional directional manner; in the sense that the four test variables were used as the go stimuli in one round of testing and as the no-go stimuli in another round of testing. This was to ensure there was effective comparison across emotions and provide a better test of whether ASD victims are able to appropriately inhibit responses to specific emotional facial expressions (Yerys et al., 2013). Evidence of reliability in the experiment can be attributed to the fact that the researchers used a typically developed control group that was used for comparison purposes.

This made it possible to compare the test group results with the control group in order to effectively deduce the differences being investigated for by the study. Evidence of validity in the experiment was given by the results that were garnered from the tests that were conducted on the test and control groups of participants. The validity of the research study was absolute because the conclusion derived from the results led to comorbidity of the two conditions. This can be explained by the need for further research to conclusively establish the relationship and insinuated interdependence between ASD and ADHD.

This can be attributed to the illustrated lack of a clear and factual explanation for heterogeneity of ASD phenotype with regard to ADHD. The pros of emotional go / no-go tasks tests include the fact that the technique is flexible giving it the