different colored circles and outlining the expected social boundaries with these people. another strategy used for children with asd and stranger anxiety is to use social stories, this includes pictures and audio tapes which makes understanding possible changes they may encounter with strangers. stranger terror stranger terror is extremely severe stranger anxiety that inhibits the child's normal functioning. the dsm- v describes stranger terror as infants with a reactive attachment disorder, inhibited type and do not respond to or initiate contact with others, but rather show extreme trepidation and ambivalence about unknown adults. anxiety and fear around strangers usually appears around six months of age and it slowly increases throughout the first year of life. this increase in stranger anxiety correlates with the same time as when the child starts crawling, walking and exploring its surroundings. the age of the child seems to play an important role in the development of stranger terror in infants. older infants (i.e. at least 12 months) seem to be more affected than younger infants because their cognitive development to know and remember has matured more than younger infants and their attachment to caregivers is stronger than younger infants. stranger anxiety and stranger terror is associated with attachment theory, the attachment to the caregiver. seen across different species, attachment increases the chances of the infant's survival in the world. in a research conducted by tyrrell and dozier (1997), they found that infants in foster care show more attachment-related difficulties than control infants in their families. those foster children were sometimes unsoothable after the contact or even just the presence of a stranger. there have been hypotheses that for these infants the appearance of the stranger represented a potential loss of the new attachment figure and it was the fear of re-experiencing this loss that prompted their behavior. those children with stranger anxiety will rarely go beyond their caregiver to explore their surroundings. stranger terror elicits strong reactions from children as described below, most likely due to the degree of traumatic event which causes their strong reactions such as the loss of a mother. in order to cope with attachment-related traumas, children with stranger terror develop abnormal means of coping with these events by viewing all adults as threatening and avoiding contact with everyone, for example. strange situation in a strange situation experiment, a child of the age of 20 months was in a room with their mother and a stranger would enter. the child would go hide behind the legs of the mother. the mother was then asked to leave the room and leave the child with the stranger. after the first separation, the child began to scream and was extremely upset. he refused all contact with the stranger and when the adult tried to pick up the child he would scream louder until put back down. any attempts by the stranger to sooth the child was unsuccessful. when the mother came back in the room for the first reunion, the child somewhat calmed down, but he was still very upset and distressed. for the second part of the experiment, the child was left alone in the room for a couple of minutes before the stranger entered again. the second the stranger entered the room the child began crying loudly again even if no contact was made. to conclude, although resistance to a stranger is common for children, the extreme reactions was far more urgent and depicted terror. in addition, most babies in the experiment show some evidence of settling when the stranger enters the room the second time. in contrast, children with stranger terror showed an increase in distress upon the stranger's entry. children go and hide when a stranger enters their home some signs of stranger terror fleeing when a person they don't know enters their home, even if they aren't interacting with the child. worried facial expressions that are typically seen on an older child. being very upset by a stranger's presence, even in the child's own home. loud screaming or arching of the back when an unfamiliar person tries to comfort or hold the child. being silent or wary for longer than normal periods with fearful facial expressions.