Dissociation in How Core Autism Features Relate to Interoceptive Dimensions: Evidence from Cardiac Awareness in Children.

Forty-nine participants is a small sample, and some analyses used only 42 or 47 participants. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that interoceptive differences cause autism features or that changing interoception changes symptoms. Sex explained more variance in overall and social affect severity than interoceptive measures did. The repetitive and restricted behaviour model was not significant overall, even though one interoceptive predictor was significant. The study measured only cardiac interoception, so it may not tell therapists about awareness of hunger, thirst, pain, bladder or bowel signals. Alexithymia and anxiety were not measured, although the paper notes they have been linked to interoception in autism. The heartbeat tracking task has been criticised for needing control measures and having poor psychophysical properties. The heartbeat discrimination task combines internal heartbeat signals with external tones, so it may not be a pure interoceptive measure.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council and European Research Council. The supplied text does not state author competing interests.