Adults with Autism and Adults with Depression Show Similar Attentional Biases to Social-Affective Images.
Kathryn E Unruh, James W Bodfish, Katherine O Gotham
PMID 29882107WHAT IT FOUND
No group differed overall in how quickly it first looked at sad, angry, or happy faces versus neutral faces.
Adults with autism or depression looked less at happy faces than controls, and adults with autism looked faster at sad faces.
Key findings
01Adults with autism or depression were slowest to orient to happy faces, while controls were quickest to orient to happy faces.
02Adults with autism were faster to first look at sad faces than neutral faces; adults with depression and controls were not.
03Within adults with autism, more severe circumscribed interests and insistence on sameness were correlated with more depressive symptoms and rumination.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The sample was small, so the study may not detect real differences. Only adults with verbal IQ at least 80, adequate verbal fluency, reading at least 5th grade, and vision of at least 20/30 at 80 cm were included, so the results do not represent all adults with autism. The groups were not sex-matched, although recruitment tried to balance female participants with autism and male participants with depression. Some participants were excluded for insufficient viewing time, although excluded participants did not differ from included participants on IQ, age, autism severity, or depression severity. The study measured attention during lab visits and cannot show whether these attention patterns cause, maintain, or result from depression or autism symptoms. The authors could not tell whether autism-specific or depression-specific mechanisms drove the observed biases because their measures were highly correlated.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use these eye-tracking patterns to diagnose autism or depression or to guide therapy. The study is small, and many first-look comparisons showed no overall diagnostic group difference.