Honorary Visiting Fellow

Affiliations: Bar Ilan University

Ofer is a clinical psychologist, an associate professor and the head of the Autism Research Lab at the Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. After completing his PhD at the ARC, and his clinical training at the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Mental Health Trust, he returned to Israel as a faculty member at Bar-Ilan.

Ofer’s research focuses on socio-emotional functioning in autism, including social communication, emotion recognition, expression and regulation, and ways to develop them through evidence-based interventions. He has conducted several treatment-evaluation studies and RCTs on technology-based interventions such as Mind Reading, The Transporters (in the UK and in Israel), and Emotiplay, and on cognitive-behavioural interventions such as the PEERS social skills training program and the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM). He is particularly interested in examining how parent-child interaction promotes the development of- and facilitates the treatment for- individuals with autism from early childhood, through adolescence and into adulthood.

Ofer is the founder and the clinical advisor of two Israeli clinical centres which provide evidence-based diagnosis and intervention services to children, adolescents and adults with ASD and their families, and in addition train clinicians and disseminate evidence-based interventions nationwide.

Selected Publications

• Implications of employment changes caused by COVID‑19 on mental health and work‑related psychological need satisfaction of autistic employees: A mixed‑methods longitudinal study, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (2021), Y Goldfarb, E Gal, O Golan
• The EU-Emotion Voice Database, Behavior Research Methods 10.3758/s13428-018-1048-1 (2018), A Lassalle, D Pigat, H O'Reilly, S Berggen, S Fridenson-Hayo, S Tal, S Elfström, A Rĺde, O Golan, S Bölte, S Baron-Cohen, D Lundqvist
• Emotiplay’: a serious game for learning about emotions in children with autism: results of a cross-cultural evaluation, European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 26:979-992 (2017), S. Fridenson-Hayo, S. Berggren, A. Lassalle, S. Tal, D. Pigat, N. Meir-Goren, H. O'Reilly, S. Ben-Zur, S. Bölte, S. Baron-Cohen, O. Golan
• The EU-Emotion Stimulus Set: A validation study, Behavior Research Methods 48:567-576 (2016), H O'Reilly, D Pigat, S Fridenson, S Berggren, S Tal, O Golan, S Bölte, S Baron-Cohen, D Lundqvist
• Basic and complex emotion recognition in children with autism: cross-cultural findings, Molecular Autism 07:52 (2016), S Fridenson-Hayo, S Berggren, A Lassalle, S Tal, D Pigat, S Bolte, S Baron-Cohen & O Golan
• The Cambridge Mindreading Face-Voice Battery for Children (CAM-C): complex emotion recognition in children with and without autism spectrum conditions, Molecular Autism 06:22 (2015), O Golan, Y Sinai-Gavrilov, S Baron-Cohen

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