How Anxious Do You Think I Am? Relationship Between State and Trait Anxiety in Children With and Without ASD During Social Tasks.

The sample was small, and the biophysiology analyses used only participants who returned for the second visit and provided usable data. Some participants were taking medications that may affect physiological arousal, and the authors did not exclude them. The study did not obtain verified diagnoses of co-occurring anxiety disorder, so anxiety levels may not reflect clinical anxiety diagnoses. The stressful task was not a real social interaction; participants presented to video judges, so it may not capture anxiety in everyday conversation. Participants were not asked to report how anxious they felt during the task, so the physiological measures were not compared with in-the-moment self-report. The study did not measure parental involvement or social independence, so differences in parent-child agreement on anxiety were not explained. The paper analysed several questionnaire and physiological outcomes separately, so no single finding should be treated as the main proof. The study was observational and did not test a treatment or intervention.

Julia Mertens, Emily R Zane, Kayla Neumeyer, and Ruth B Grossman declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that adolescents with autism are more physiologically anxious during social tasks. Their heart rate, skin conductance, and heart-rate variability responses were not higher than typical peers, and the parent-report association was correlational.