Observed emotional reactivity in response to frustration tasks in psychiatrically hospitalized youth with autism spectrum disorder.
Jessie B Northrup, Matthew Goodwin, Joshua Montrenes and 5 others
PMID 32169018WHAT IT FOUND
Hospitalized autistic youth showed more intense and longer negative reactions during frustration tasks than before them, then generally returned to baseline during recovery.
Youth with little or no speech and lower adaptive skills reacted more strongly.
Key findings
01Negative affect increased from baseline to frustration tasks and decreased from frustration to recovery; recovery was not different from baseline overall.
02Lower adaptive functioning was associated with greater increases in negative affect from baseline to frustration and from baseline to recovery.
03Youth with phrase speech or fluent speech showed smaller increases in negative affect from baseline to frustration than non-verbal youth.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was psychiatrically hospitalized and included only youth with ASD, so results may not apply to autistic youth in schools or clinics. There was no comparison group, so the study cannot say whether these reactions are specific to ASD, hospitalization, or both. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show how reactivity changes as a child develops. The frustration tasks were adapted from preschool tasks and may not have provoked equally strong reactions across ages and abilities. Baseline was defined as a neutral video, which may not have captured each child's true resting affect. Some coding variables had lower reliability, especially range of affect and proportion of negative intervals. Reported psychiatric and behavioral problems were very high in this sample, which may have reduced the chance of finding relationships with those measures. 20 transparent-box tasks were invalidated because the box opened without the correct key.
Declared interests
The paper is tagged as supported by NIH extramural and non-U.S. government research funding. The provided text does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration or state whether the sponsor designed, collected, analyzed, or wrote the study.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that improving speech or adaptive skills will reduce emotional reactivity. The study was cross-sectional, used hospitalized youth, and did not test interventions.