The Perceived Causal Relations Between Sensory Reactivity Differences and Anxiety Symptoms in Autistic Adults.

Background: Rates of anxiety are inordinately high in autistic adults. Sensory reactivity differences, such as hyperreactivity (e.g., strong reactions to sound), hyporeactivity (e.g., no, or slower reactions to pain), and seeking (e.g., fascination with spinning objects), are a diagnostic criterion of autism and have been linked with anxiety. Understanding how individuals perceive these to be causally related can impact the assessment and treatment of anxiety. Therefore, we examined the perceived causal relations (PCR) between sensory reactivity differences and anxiety in autistic adults. Method: Two hundred forty-six autistic adults aged 18-76 years took part in an online study. They completed self-report assessments of sensory reactivity differences, and anxiety, followed by the PCR scale, indicating whether they perceived their sensory reactivity differences to be more of a cause or an effect of their anxiety symptoms. Results: We found sensory reactivity hyperreactivity, hyporeactivity, and seeking to be significantly correlated with anxiety. Further, we found total sensory hyperreactivity, and visual, auditory, and olfactory hyperreactivity, to be perceived as significantly more of a cause of anxiety than an effect, and total sensory seeking, and tactile and vestibular seeking, to be perceived as significantly more of an effect of anxiety than a cause. Conclusion: Future individualized approaches to treating anxiety in autistic individuals may benefit from differentiating between potential sensory causes of anxiety (e.g. hypersensitivities) vs. potential sensory effects of anxiety (e.g. sensory seeking behaviors).

Why is this an important issue?: Autistic people are more likely to experience anxiety compared with the general population. Sensory reactivity differences, such as hyperreactivity (e.g., strong reactivity to sounds), hyporeactivity (e.g., not noticing touch), or seeking (e.g., being fascinated by spinning objects), are common in autistic individuals, and may be a risk factor for anxiety. However, existing anxiety treatments are not always effective for autistic people. Understanding how autistic people feel their anxiety and sensory reactivity differences are causally linked could be important to help clinicians understand the challenges that should be prioritized in anxiety treatment for autistic people. What was the purpose of this study?: In this study, we aimed at examining sensory reactivity differences and anxiety symptoms in autistic adults, and asking them whether they perceive their anxiety symptoms to be more of a cause or an effect of their sensory reactivity differences. What did the researchers do?: In our study, we measured sensory reactivity differences and anxiety symptoms using online surveys. For the sensory reactivity differences and anxiety symptoms that each individual reported to be present, they were then asked how much they felt each anxiety symptom was a cause of their sensory reactivity differences, and how much they felt each sensory reactivity difference was a cause of their anxiety symptoms. This study included 246 autistic adults aged 18­76 years. What were the results of the study?: Our results showed that the autistic individuals felt that their sensory hyperreactivity, including hyperreactivity related to vision, hearing, and scent, is more of a cause than an effect of anxiety. However, they also felt that their sensory seeking, especially touch- and balance-related seeking, is more of an effect than a cause of anxiety. What do these findings add to what was already known?: Although sensory hyperreactivity has been shown earlier to be a cause of anxiety for autistic individuals, our study was the first to suggest that anxiety may influence sensory seeking, which is something that can be tested in future research studies. What are potential weaknesses in the study?: We did not ask participants about co-occurring conditions, such as if they have additional diagnoses related to intellectual disability or attention deficit hyperreactivity disorder, which means there may be important differences between individuals that we did not examine. Also, we did not measure key symptoms associated with wider anxiety conditions and autism-related anxiety symptoms, such as social fears unrelated to negative self-assessment, which would be important for clinical understanding. How will these findings help autistic adults now or in the future?: Understanding how people perceive their traits and symptoms to be causally related can impact how effective anxiety treatments are for individuals. So, our findings can importantly help inform clinical approaches to the treatment of anxiety for autistic individuals.

Brain structural correlates of autistic traits across the diagnostic divide: A grey matter and white matter microstructure study.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are a set of neurodevelopmental conditions characterised by difficulties in social interaction and communication as well as stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest. Autistic traits exist in a continuum across the general population, whilst the extreme end of this distribution is diagnosed as clinical ASD. While many studies have investigated brain structure in autism using a case-control design, few have used a dimensional approach. To add to this growing body of literature, we investigated the structural brain correlates of autistic traits in a mixed sample of adult participants (25 ASD and 66 neurotypicals; age: 18-60 years). We examined the relationship between regional brain volumes (using voxel-based morphometry and surface-based morphometry) and white matter microstructure properties (using Diffusion Tensor Imaging) and autistic traits (using Autism Spectrum Quotient). Our findings show grey matter differences in regions including the orbitofrontal cortex and lingual gyrus, and suggestive evidence for white matter microstructure differences in tracts including the superior longitudinal fasciculus being related to higher autistic traits. These grey matter and white matter microstructure findings from our study are consistent with previous reports and support the brain structural differences in ASD. These findings provide further support for shared aetiology for autistic traits across the diagnostic divide.

Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions.

There has been considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e., emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise. One big challenge when studying epistemic emotions is systematically inducting these emotions in restricted experimental settings. The current study created a novel stimulus set called Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): a collection of 166 short magic trick video clips that aim to induce a variety of epistemic emotions. MagicCATs are freely available for research and can be used in a variety of ways to examine epistemic emotions. Rating data also support that the magic tricks elicit a variety of epistemic emotions with sufficient inter-stimulus variability, demonstrating good psychometric properties for their use in psychological experiments.

The Effect of Anonymous Computer-Mediated Communication on State Anxiety: An Experimental Study.

This study examined the effect of anonymous computer-mediated communication (CMC) on state anxiety, specifically focusing on whether the valence of the interaction affected state anxiety before completing an anxiety-inducing task. Sixty-two female participants aged 18-25 were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: positive CMC, negative CMC, and blog. Self-report measures of state anxiety were taken at baseline; after participants had been given instructions about the anxiety-inducing task; after 10 minutes of CMC/blog writing; and after the anxiety-inducing task had been completed. Results showed that participants in the positive CMC condition showed a significant and moderate decrease in anxiety following the CMC, whereas those in the negative CMC condition showed a nonsignificant but moderate increase in anxiety following the CMC. Anxiety remained relatively unaffected by the blog condition. After completing the anxiety-inducing task, there were no differences in anxiety scores between groups. The findings show that CMC can be beneficial for relieving state anxiety, but the valence of the communication is crucial. This has implications for advice and training given to those participating in and supporting CMC where mental health issues might be discussed.

Lack of Privileged Access to Awareness for Rewarding Social Scenes in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Reduced social motivation is hypothesised to underlie social behavioural symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The extent to which rewarding social stimuli are granted privileged access to awareness in ASD is currently unknown. We use continuous flash suppression to investigate whether individuals with and without ASD show privileged access to awareness for social over nonsocial rewarding scenes that are closely matched for stimulus features. Strong evidence for a privileged access to awareness for rewarding social over nonsocial scenes was observed in neurotypical adults. No such privileged access was seen in ASD individuals, and moderate support for the null model was noted. These results suggest that the purported deficits in social motivation in ASD may extend to early processing mechanisms.

Empathy modulates the temporal structure of social attention.

Individuals with low empathy often show reduced attention towards social stimuli. A limitation of this literature is the lack of empirical work that has explicitly characterized how this relationship manifests itself over time. We investigate this issue by analysing data from two large eye-tracking datasets (total n = 176). Via growth-curve analysis, we demonstrate that self-reported empathy (as measured by the empathy quotient-EQ) predicts the temporal evolution of gaze behaviour under conditions where social and non-social stimuli compete for attention. In both datasets, we found that EQ not only predicted a global increase in social attention, but predicted a different temporal profile of social attention. Specifically, we detected a reliable effect of empathy on gaze towards social images after prolonged viewing. An analysis of switch latencies revealed that low-EQ observers switched gaze away from an initially fixated social image more frequently and at earlier latencies than high-EQ observers. Our analyses demonstrate that modelling these temporal components of gaze signals may reveal useful behavioural phenotypes. The explanatory power of this approach may provide enhanced biomarkers for conditions marked by deficits in empathy-related processes.

Individual differences in responsivity to social rewards: Insights from two eye-tracking tasks.

Humans generally prefer social over nonsocial stimuli from an early age. Reduced preference for social rewards has been observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). This preference has typically been noted in separate tasks that measure orienting toward and engaging with social stimuli. In this experiment, we used two eye-tracking tasks to index both of these aspects of social preference in in 77 typical adults. We used two measures, global effect and preferential looking time. The global effect task measures saccadic deviation toward a social stimulus (related to 'orienting'), while the preferential looking task records gaze duration bias toward social stimuli (relating to 'engaging'). Social rewards were found to elicit greater saccadic deviation and greater gaze duration bias, suggesting that they have both greater salience and higher value compared to nonsocial rewards. Trait empathy was positively correlated with the measure of relative value of social rewards, but not with their salience. This study thus elucidates the relationship of empathy with social reward processing.

Autistic traits modulate mimicry of social but not nonsocial rewards.

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are associated with diminished responsiveness to social stimuli, and especially to social rewards such as smiles. Atypical responsiveness to social rewards, which reinforce socially appropriate behavior in children, can potentially lead to a cascade of deficits in social behavior. Individuals with ASC often show diminished spontaneous mimicry of social stimuli in a natural setting. In the general population, mimicry is modulated both by the reward value and the sociality of the stimulus (i.e., whether the stimulus is perceived to belong to a conspecific or an inanimate object). Since empathy and autistic traits are distributed continuously in the general population, this study aimed to test if and how these traits modulated automatic mimicry of rewarded social and nonsocial stimuli. High and low rewards were associated with human and robot hands using a conditioned learning paradigm. Thirty-six participants from the general population then completed a mimicry task involving performing a prespecified hand movement which was either compatible or incompatible with a hand movement presented to the participant. High autistic traits (measured using the Autism Spectrum Quotient, AQ) predicted lesser mimicry of high-reward than low-reward conditioned human hands, whereas trait empathy showed an opposite pattern of correlations. No such relations were observed for high-reward vs. low-reward conditioned robot hands. These results demonstrate how autistic traits and empathy modulate the effects of reward on mimicry of social compared to nonsocial stimuli. This evidence suggests a potential role for the reward system in underlying the atypical social behavior in individuals with ASC, who constitute the extreme end of the spectrum of autistic traits.

The role of empathy in choosing rewards from another's perspective.

As social animals, we regularly act in the interest of others by making decisions on their behalf. These decisions can take the form of choices between smaller short-term rewards and larger long-term rewards, and can be effectively indexed by temporal discounting (TD). In a TD paradigm, a reward loses subjective value with increasing delay presumably because it becomes more difficult to simulate how much the recipient (e.g., future self) will value it. If this is the case, then the value of delayed rewards should be discounted even more steeply when we are choosing for someone whose feelings we do not readily simulate, such as socially distant strangers. Second, the ability to simulate shows individual differences and is indexed by trait empathy. We hypothesized that individuals high in trait empathy will more readily simulate, and hence discount less steeply for distant others, compared to those who are low on trait empathy. To test these predictions, we asked 63 participants from the general population to perform a TD task from the perspectives of close and distant others, as well as their own. People were found to discount less steeply for themselves, and the steepness of TD increased with increasing distance from self. Additionally, individuals who scored high in trait empathy were found to discount less steeply for distant others compared to those who scored low. These findings confirm the role of empathy in determining how we choose rewards for others.