Emotion Dysregulation is Substantially Elevated in Autism Compared to the General Population: Impact on Psychiatric Services.
Caitlin M Conner, Josh Golt, Rebecca Shaffer and 3 others
PMID 33815651WHAT IT FOUND
Youth with autism showed substantially higher emotion dysregulation than the general population, with community samples scoring in the clinical range.
This impairment predicted psychiatric hospitalization, emergency service use, and medication prescription, even after accounting for age, intellectual disability, and ADHD symptoms.
Key findings
01Community-based youth with ASD had nearly four times more clinically elevated emotion reactivity scores than the general population sample.
02Emotion dysregulation was significantly associated with prior psychiatric hospitalization, recent emergency service use, and psychotropic medication use in both community and inpatient ASD groups.
03These associations remained significant even after controlling for demographic factors, intellectual disability diagnosis, and ADHD symptoms.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
All data was parent-reported; there was no self-report from the patients and no verification of service use via medical records. The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot prove that emotion dysregulation causes increased service use. The community sample was self-selected online and may not represent all families of children with ASD. No consistent measure of autism symptom severity was available across all three groups, so it is unclear if higher dysregulation in the inpatient group is partly due to more severe autism.
Declared interests
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the association between emotion dysregulation and service use as proof that treating dysregulation will prevent hospitalization. The study is cross-sectional and relies on parent report without medical record verification, so it identifies a risk marker rather than a causal mechanism.