Sex differences in automatic emotion regulation in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.
Alexandra P Key, Dorita Jones, Blythe A Corbett
PMID 35103402WHAT IT FOUND
In adolescents with autism, females were more accurate at withholding responses to angry faces, while males were more accurate at pressing for happy faces.
Brain signals for attention and inhibition differed by sex; early face perception signals did not.
Key findings
01Females were more accurate than males on response-withholding trials, especially withholding trials with angry faces, while males were more accurate than females on target trials with happy faces.
02Early face perception brain responses did not differ by sex, but later conflict-detection and attention/inhibition responses did, with males showing larger responses in several conditions.
03Associations between autism severity or social functioning and brain responses differed by sex, with some correlations significant only in males and others only in females.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 45 adolescents with autism, and behavioral data were missing for one female participant. It compared males and females within autism only; there was no non-autism comparison group, so differences cannot be separated from general autism-related patterns. Many participants had parent-reported anxiety scores in clinically significant ranges, which may influence emotion-processing responses. The brain-behavior correlations were exploratory and were not corrected for multiple significance testing. The task did not include neutral faces, so sex differences in automatic emotion perception and regulation could not be fully separated. Error trials were not excluded from the EEG analysis, which could have affected some brain response measures. The study was a baseline analysis from a social-skills treatment trial, so it does not show that any treatment works.
Declared interests
The publication metadata lists NIH extramural research support. No conflict-of-interest declaration appears in the supplied article text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that autism therapy should be changed by sex based on this paper. The study measured baseline brain and behavior differences in 45 adolescents, did not test treatment, and the brain-behavior correlations were exploratory without correction for multiple testing.