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Enhancing Social Skills in Autism Through Music

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Music Interventions for Neurodevelopmental Disorders

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Abstract

Music treatments addressed to individuals with autism are usually aimed at enhancing social skills. To do so, musical activities are paired with a series of underlying competencies to be acquired. This chapter focuses on some of these basic competencies, such as the detection of the congruence between the emotional valence of music and the mood states it elicits, the identification of the relationships between the sounds (hearing) and the motor acts (vision) which produced them, the ability to mirror the partner’s mental state through the production of musical acts. Experimental findings supporting the notion that these basic competencies can be acquired or refined by people with autism, as well as the outcomes of music treatments focused on those skills, are reported and discussed in the chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy

    Alessandro Antonietti

  2. Department of Psychology, Division of Education and Human Studies, Champlain College, Burlington, VT, USA

    Barbara Colombo

  3. Department of Psychology, Division of Education and Human Studies, Champlain College, Burlington, VT, USA

    Braelyn R. DeRocher

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  1. Alessandro Antonietti
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  2. Barbara Colombo
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  3. Braelyn R. DeRocher
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Correspondence to Alessandro Antonietti .

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Antonietti, A., Colombo, B., DeRocher, B.R. (2018). Enhancing Social Skills in Autism Through Music. In: Music Interventions for Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97151-3_3

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