Immersive and maladaptive daydreaming and divergent thinking in autism spectrum disorders.

Little is known about the internal mental experiences of individuals with ASD. While some research suggests a limited capacity for imagination, other studies show heightened interest in fantasy and unique forms of creative thinking in ASD. This study explored daydreaming experiences in adults with ASD, with a focus on immersive daydreaming and its relation to divergent thinking abilities. Individuals with and without a diagnosis of ASD were surveyed on their daydreaming habits and completed a divergent thinking task. Experiences of immersive daydreaming were identified in 42% of adults with ASD and were related to broad ASD traits in those without a diagnosis of ASD. However, ASD diagnosis was unrelated to originality of divergent thinking, which was negatively associated with immersive daydreaming. Moreover, daydreaming experiences in ASD were diverse. A more nuanced understanding of the mental experiences in ASD may assist in the development of interventions and support for this population.

Effects of emotional cues on novel word learning in typically developing children in relation to broader autism traits.

Emotion can influence various cognitive processes. Communication with children often involves exaggerated emotional expressions and emotive language. Children with autism spectrum disorder often show a reduced tendency to attend to emotional information. Typically developing children aged 7 to 9 years who varied in their level of autism-like traits learned the nonsense word names of nine novel toys, which were presented with either happy, fearful, or neutral emotional cues. Emotional cues had no influence on word recognition or recall performance. Eye-tracking data showed differences in visual attention depending on the type of emotional cues and level of autism-like traits. The findings suggest that the influence of emotion on attention during word learning differs according to whether the children have lower or higher levels of autism-like traits, but this influence does not affect word learning outcomes.

Maladaptive daydreaming and emotional regulation difficulties: A network analysis.

This study explored the network structure of Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD), and links between MD and emotional regulation difficulties. Participants (n = 542) completed an online survey on MD and emotional regulation difficulties. Two network models were estimated. In the MD-only network, items clustered in three communities, most items were positively connected, and difficulty controlling the daydream was most central. In the expanded network, there were many cross-construct associations, and limited emotional regulation strategies and difficulty controlling the daydream were most central. These findings indicate that difficulties with control is central to MD, and that MD may be related to dysfunctional emotional regulation.

Cross-modal emotion recognition and autism-like traits in typically developing children.

The ability to explicitly recognize emotions develops gradually throughout childhood, and children usually have greater difficulty in recognizing emotions from the voice than from the face. However, little is known about how children integrate vocal and facial cues to recognize an emotion, particularly during mid to late childhood. Furthermore, children with an autism spectrum disorder often show a reduced ability to recognize emotions, especially when integrating emotion from multiple modalities. The current preliminary study explored the ability of typically developing children aged 7-9 years to match emotional tones of voice to facial expressions and whether this ability varies according to the level of autism-like traits. Overall, children were the least accurate when matching happy and fearful voices to faces, commonly pairing happy voices with angry faces and fearful voices with sad faces. However, the level of autism-like traits was not associated with matching accuracy. These results suggest that 7- to 9-year-old children have difficulty in integrating vocal and facial emotional expressions but that differences in cross-modal emotion matching in relation to the broader autism phenotype are not evident in this task for this age group with the current sample.

Self-Reported Medication and Recreational Drug Effectiveness in Maladaptive Daydreaming.

Maladaptive daydreaming is a proposed disorder characterized by excessive daydreaming that causes subjective distress and/or interferes with function. The daydreaming involves complex inner worlds, characters, and plots that are understood by the person as fantasy, and the daydreaming may occupy many hours per day. The disorder has good reliability and validity in studies using a structured interview and a self-report measure developed for it. To date, no information on the responses of maladaptive daydreamers to either recreational or prescription drugs has been available. The authors obtained survey data from 202 participants who completed the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale-16. The results indicated that this population has tried many different recreational drugs and has been prescribed many different psychotropic medications. Most of the participants reported little to no effect of drugs or medications on daydreaming, although tentative recommendations can be made in favor of prescribing antidepressants and against the use of marijuana for individuals with maladaptive daydreaming.

A daily diary study on maladaptive daydreaming, mind wandering, and sleep disturbances: Examining within-person and between-persons relations.

Cross-sectional and experimental research have shown that task-unrelated thoughts (i.e., mind wandering) relate to sleep disturbances, but there is little research on whether this association generalizes to the day-level and other kinds of task-unrelated mentation. We employed a longitudinal daily diary design to examine the within-person and between-person associations between three self-report instruments measuring mind wandering, maladaptive daydreaming (a condition characterized by having elaborate fantasy daydreams so insistent that they interfere with daily functioning) and sleep disturbances. A final sample of 126 participants self-identified as experiencing maladaptive daydreaming completed up to 8 consecutive daily reports (in total 869 daily observations). The scales showed acceptable-to-excellent within-person reliability (i.e., systematic day-to-day change) and excellent between-person reliability. The proportion of between-person variance was 36% for sleep disturbances, 57% for mind wandering, and 75% for maladaptive daydreaming, respectively (the remaining being stochastic and systematic within-person variance). Contrary to our pre-registered hypothesis, maladaptive daydreaming did not significantly predict sleep disturbances the following night, B = -0.00 (SE = 0.04), p = .956. Exploratory analyses indicated that while nightly sleep disturbances predicted mind wandering the following day, B = 0.20 (SE = 0.04), p < .001, it did not significantly predict maladaptive daydreaming the following day, B = -0.04 (SE = 0.05), p = .452. Moreover, daily mind wandering did not significantly predict sleep disturbances the following night, B = 0.02 (SE = 0.05), p = .731. All variables correlated at the between-person level. We discuss the implications concerning the differences between maladaptive daydreaming and mind wandering and the possibility of targeting sleep for mind wandering interventions.

Effects of Prosodic and Semantic Cues on Facial Emotion Recognition in Relation to Autism-Like Traits.

The current study investigated whether those with higher levels of autism-like traits process emotional information from speech differently to those with lower levels of autism-like traits. Neurotypical adults completed the autism-spectrum quotient and an emotional priming task. Vocal primes with varied emotional prosody, semantics, or a combination, preceded emotional target faces. Prime-target pairs were congruent or incongruent in their emotional content. Overall, congruency effects were found for combined prosody-semantic primes, however no congruency effects were found for semantic or prosodic primes alone. Further, those with higher levels of autism-like traits were not influenced by the prime stimuli. These results suggest that failure to integrate emotional information across modalities may be characteristic of the broader autism phenotype.