Department News
Clinical Psychiatry News Highlights Porges' Listening Project for Austic Children

An article in a recent edition of the online newsletter Clinical Psychiatry News highlighted research by Stephen Porges, Ph.D. The article, "The Listening Project: Acoustic Intervention Boosts Social Engagement in Autism," reports Dr. Porges' success with a novel intervention that has improved social communication skills in about 80 percent of nearly 100 autistic children in a double-blind, randomized study. For five 45-minute weekly sessions, the children listened to computer altered sounds filtered to mimic the frequency band of the human voice. Improvements were seen immediately and have lasted through three months of follow-up. Dr. Porges reported on the intervention at the annual conference of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry.