The idea was that mental resources which would have been used for interaction and communication could be redeployed to develop expertise in some arbitrary task.

ECONOMIST: Autism and extraordinary ability: Genius locus | The

About 20 years ago psychologist Alan Page Fiske and author of Structures of Social Life (Free Press 1993), now Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, wrote about the Four Elementary Forms of Sociality that describe our mental orientation of the form of exchange that we think we should use in each interaction with someone else.

FORBES: Four Elementary Forms of Sociality Impacting Trust and Relationships

"TCIT benefits misbehaving kids, but it also benefits behaving kids, " said Melanie Fernandez, director of the Parent-Child Interaction Therapy Program at the Child Mind Institute in New York, a nonprofit focused on child mental health, which has been researching TCIT for several years.

WSJ: Teaching Kids to Give Themselves a Timeout