University College London, UK.
Autism. 2022 Nov;26(8):2117-2135. doi: 10.1177/13623613221077721. Epub 2022 Mar 8.
Recently, researchers have been interested in how autistic people experience loneliness. Yet, most of this research has focused on loneliness in autistic children and young people. We present the results of a systematic review on loneliness in autistic adults. A systematic review is a rigorous way of searching for all existing research on a topic and summarizing the findings about specific questions. We searched for all research published on this topic until 9 April 2021. We found 34 articles that investigated loneliness in autistic adults. This research showed that (1) there is fairly little research that has involved directly asking autistic adults about their first-hand experiences of loneliness (e.g. what loneliness feels like for them); (2) few research studies have used loneliness questionnaires specifically developed for autistic adults (this was attempted in just one research study); (3) collective loneliness (i.e. loneliness associated with how much an autistic person feels they 'fit in' to society) seems important to autistic adults but has not been investigated as commonly as other aspects of loneliness (e.g. loneliness associated with romantic relationships or friendships); (4) things that might increase loneliness in autistic adults include anxiety and depression, and a lack of autism understanding and acceptance, for example; and (5) things that might reduce loneliness in autistic adults include having relationships and self-acceptance, for example. In our article, we discuss the kinds of future research on loneliness in autistic adults that might be useful.
最近,研究人员对自闭症患者的孤独感产生了兴趣。然而,大多数此类研究都集中在自闭症儿童和青少年的孤独感上。我们呈现了一项关于自闭症成年人孤独感的系统综述的结果。系统综述是一种严谨的方法,用于搜索关于某个主题的所有现有研究,并总结关于特定问题的发现。我们搜索了截至 2021 年 4 月 9 日所有关于该主题的研究。我们发现了 34 篇研究自闭症成年人孤独感的文章。这些研究表明:(1)很少有研究直接询问自闭症成年人他们对孤独感的第一手体验(例如,孤独感对他们来说是什么样的);(2)很少有研究使用专门为自闭症成年人开发的孤独感问卷(只有一项研究尝试了这一点);(3)集体孤独感(即与自闭症患者感到自己融入社会的程度相关的孤独感)对自闭症成年人似乎很重要,但尚未像其他孤独感方面(例如与恋爱关系或友谊相关的孤独感)那样普遍进行研究;(4)可能增加自闭症成年人孤独感的因素包括焦虑和抑郁,以及缺乏对自闭症的理解和接受等;(5)可能减少自闭症成年人孤独感的因素包括人际关系和自我接受等。在我们的文章中,我们讨论了未来可能对自闭症成年人孤独感研究有用的研究类型。