Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc, CNRS, 1251 Avenue Centrale, Grenoble, 38000, France.
Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Mol Autism. 2024 Nov 21;15(1):49. doi: 10.1186/s13229-024-00622-4.
Autistic individuals often have difficulty flexibly adjusting their behavior. However, laboratory experiments have yielded inconsistent results, potentially due to various influencing factors, which need to be examined in detail. This study aimed to investigate the hypothesis that the social content of stimuli could play a specific role in some of the flexibility challenges faced by autistic individuals. The second aim was to explore sex differences in this context.
We analyzed data from 256 adult participants (124 with autism), matched on age, gender, and sex, who performed an emotional shifting task involving unpredictable shifts between positive and negative stimuli. Additionally, the task included both social and non-social conditions.
Our results revealed a larger switch cost in the social than in the non-social condition, and this was more pronounced in autistic than in non-autistic individuals. Furthermore, we observed that autistic females differed from autistic males in the non-social condition and from non-autistic females in the social condition.
The online nature of the study reduced the control over participant conditions. In addition, further studies are needed to investigate whether these results apply to the broader autism spectrum.
Building on previous research demonstrating a greater switch cost in autistic than non-autistic individuals for socio-emotional stimuli, our study further extends these findings by highlighting that the social context, rather than the emotional nature of the stimuli alone, may play a significant role in the flexibility challenges faced by autistic individuals. Our findings also contribute to the literature on sex differences in autism.
自闭症个体通常难以灵活地调整自己的行为。然而，实验室实验得出的结果并不一致，这可能是由于各种影响因素所致，需要详细检查。本研究旨在检验一个假设，即刺激的社会内容可能在自闭症个体面临的一些灵活性挑战中发挥特定作用。第二个目的是在这方面探讨性别差异。
我们分析了 256 名成年参与者（124 名自闭症患者）的数据，这些参与者在年龄、性别和性别方面相匹配，他们执行了一项情感转换任务，涉及在积极和消极刺激之间不可预测地转换。此外，该任务包括社会和非社会条件。
我们的结果表明，社会条件下的转换成本大于非社会条件下的转换成本，且自闭症个体的转换成本大于非自闭症个体的转换成本。此外，我们观察到自闭症女性在非社会条件下与自闭症男性不同，在社会条件下与非自闭症女性不同。
研究的在线性质降低了对参与者条件的控制。此外，还需要进一步的研究来调查这些结果是否适用于更广泛的自闭症谱系。
在先前研究表明自闭症个体对社会情感刺激的转换成本大于非自闭症个体的基础上，本研究进一步扩展了这些发现，强调了社会背景而不仅仅是刺激的情绪性质可能在自闭症个体面临的灵活性挑战中发挥重要作用。我们的研究结果还为自闭症中的性别差异文献做出了贡献。
