We present evidence for the affective realism hypothesis, that incidental affect is a key ingredient in an individual's experience of the world. In three studies, we used an interocular suppression technique (continuous flash suppression [CFS]) to present smiling, scowling, or neutral faces suppressed from conscious visual awareness while consciously perceived neutral faces were presented at three different timing intervals: 150 ms before, 150 ms after, and concurrent with the suppressed affective faces (Studies 1 and 3) or at timing intervals of 100 ms (Study 2). Results for all three studies revealed that consciously perceived neutral faces were experienced significantly more positively (e.g., as more trustworthy) when concurrently paired with suppressed smiling faces than when concurrently paired with suppressed scowling faces; there was no effect of suppressed affective faces on first impressions in the other timing conditions. This pattern of results is consistent with the affective realism hypothesis but inconsistent with both affective misattribution and affective priming interpretations. Incidental affect must be meaningfully contiguous in time with the target stimulus to be experienced as a property of the target. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience high levels of anxiety and difficulty with emotion regulation and self-control. Music has been shown to modulate moods and emotions and may be useful in mediating individuals' physiological state. This study investigated whether listening to preferred self-selected music would have a significant physiological effect with regard to skin conductance responses, and also psychologically as measured by a self-report anxiety tool, among persons with ASD as compared to a matched control group. Results showed that participants with ASD were more responsive physiologically to their preferred music than those in the comparison group. They did not differ from controls in their responses to a piece of music previously demonstrated to induce feelings of relaxation among typical populations. Our findings indicate that persons with ASD are particularly responsive to the influence of music with regard to modulating their physiological state and this could potentially be a useful non-pharmacological tool for self-regulating emotional responses to stressors in their environment.

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The enhanced perceptual processing of visual features in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is supported by an abundance of evidence in the spatial domain, with less robust evidence regarding whether this extends to information presented across time. The current study aimed to replicate and extend previous work finding that children with an ASD demonstrated enhanced perceptual accuracy in detecting feature‐based (but not categorically defined) targets in time, when these were presented quickly, at a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 50 ms per item. Specifically, we extend the range of SOAs to examine the temporal boundaries of this enhanced accuracy and examine whether there is a relationship between ASD‐related traits and detection accuracy on temporal visual search tasks. Individuals with autism perceived feature‐based targets with statistically higher accuracy than their typically developing peers between SOAs of 39 and 65 ms and were numerically faster at all SOAs. No group differences were noted for category‐based task accuracy. Our results also demonstrated that ASD‐related traits measured by the autism spectrum quotient were positively correlated with accuracy on the feature‐based task. Overall, results suggest that accurate visual perception of features (particularly color) is enhanced in children with ASD across time. Lay Summary Our results suggest that children with autism are able to process visual features, such as color, more accurately than typically developing children, even when these are presented very rapidly. Accuracy was higher in children with higher levels of autism‐related traits and symptoms. Our findings suggest that more accurate visual perception exists not only across space in children with autism, as much of the existing literature demonstrates, but also over time. Autism Res 2020, 13: 1561–1572. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.