Understanding cognitive flexibility in emotional evaluation in autistic males and females: the social context matters.
Adeline Lacroix, Yoann Bennetot-Deveria, Monica Baciu and 4 others
PMID 39574145WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic adults were slower when revising emotion judgements about social scenes whose context contradicted their first impression.
For non-social scenes, the difference was smaller. This points to difficulty with unpredictable social context, not a general flexibility deficit.
Key findings
01Autistic adults had a larger slowdown than non-autistic adults when they had to change an emotion judgement after social context contradicted their first rating.
02Autistic females were more accurate than autistic males on non-social emotional scenes, but less accurate than non-autistic females on social scenes.
03Across groups, accuracy and response time were worse when context required a change and when scenes were social.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was online, so diagnosis and testing conditions were less controlled than in a laboratory. Participants could only report other diagnoses in general terms, so the exact influence of conditions such as ADHD, depression, or anxiety was not fully known. The sample was limited to cisgender adults aged 18 to 45 and did not represent the whole autism spectrum, especially people with intellectual disability. Autistic transgender individuals were excluded because there were too few for group comparisons, so the findings do not cover them. Autistic males had lower educational attainment than the other groups, which may be related to the task performance. This was a lab task, not a treatment study, so it does not show that any therapy improves flexibility.
Declared interests
Funded by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, CerCoG@UGA IDEX UGA, and MIAI@Grenoble Alpe. The supplied text does not report conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that autistic adults have a general cognitive flexibility deficit. The larger response-time switch cost was mainly for social scenes, and the paper reports no difference in switch cost for non-social scenes.