Meaningful social interactions as a foundation for affection and learning for autistic individuals

Social interactions are postulated as a crucial part of socioemotional development and significant outcomes in life (Bauminger et al., 2003; Healy et al., 2013). There are different types of social interactions that we experience during our life, like caregiver-child, peer, and teacher-student interactions. Historically, social interactions have been promoted from an ableist perspective in autistic populations (Nario-Redmond, 2020). These modes of interactions expect individuals to conform to neurotypical social exchanges creating a great source of negative experiences for autistic individuals, which translates into stigma and mental health issues due to the impact on affectivity capabilities. Social interactions and their impact on socioemotional development have been stated as an essential mainstay for learning. Learning occurs when meaningful interactions develop, which, in turn, happen in specific shared activities and employ multiple resources. In this chapter, we provide a detailed description of how social interaction, affectivity, and learning interplay in the development of the autistic population. We discuss how the classical development and support models lack the understanding of the relevance of meaningful affection-based interactions to promote learning. We propose, as an alternative, the use of socio-ecological models (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998; Vidal et al., 2018; Vidal et al., 2022) to support a positive learning experience paradigm, promoting the development of social interactions in autistic populations.