Autistic traits and social anxiety predict differential performance on social cognitive tasks in typically developing young adults

Abstract

The current work examined the unique contribution that autistic traits and social anxiety have on tasks examining attention and emotion processing. In Study 1, 119 typically-developing college students completed a flanker task assessing the control of attention to target faces and away from distracting faces during emotion identification. In Study 2, 208 typically-developing college students performed a visual search task which required identification of whether a series of 8 or 16 emotional faces depicted the same or different emotions. Participants with more self-reported autistic traits performed more slowly on the flanker task in Study 1 than those with fewer autistic traits when stimuli depicted complex emotions. In Study 2, participants higher in social anxiety performed less accurately on trials showing all complex faces; participants with autistic traits showed no differences. These studies suggest that traits related to autism and to social anxiety differentially impact social cognitive processing.

Angry and Fearful Face Conflict Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

“…Because we sought to examine the role of realistic ecologically valid stimuli (Wheatley et al, 2011) on behavioral reaction times and accuracy between two groups of combat veterans, we used an ethnically diverse set of color faces without masking (Liu et al, 2013; Dickter et al, 2018). Faces were used from four face sets: the Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (ADFES) (Van Der Schalk et al, 2011), the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF) (Lundqvist et al, 1998), the Warsaw Set of Emotional Facial Expression Pictures (WSEFEP) (Olszanowski et al, 2015) and the Radboud Faces Database (RFD) (Langner et al, 2010).…”

Associations of subclinical autistic-like traits with brain structural variation using diffusion tensor imaging and voxel-based morphometry

“…Multiple studies have found that non-clinical individuals with higher AQ scores show impaired performance on different cognitive and behavioural tasks, with patterns resembling those of ASD patients. This includes global visual processing [9], reduced neural response to affective touch [10] or attention and emotion processing [11], as well as a preference for predictability [12]. With autistic-like traits being continuously distributed across the population, it is still unclear whether correlations with biological parameters such as in ASD patients are also present in non-clinical subjects to a lesser extent.…”

Social anxiety in adults with autism: a qualitative study

“…A handful of studies, for example, have recruited non-clinical university student samples (with a maximum sample size of 623 individuals), to explore relationships between autism and SA (Dickter et al, 2018 ; White, Bray et al, 2012 ; White, Kreiser et al, 2012 ). Participants across studies completed the Autism Quotient, that assesses behaviours and preferences suggestive of autism (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al, 2001a ), and the Social Phobia Anxiety Inventory—23, that assesses behavioural, cognitive and affective symptoms indicative of SA (SPAI, 23; Roberson-Nay et al, 2007 ).…”

“…Findings indicated that traits could co-occur and be highly correlated, yet this was not merely attributable to overlap of features across conditions or an artefact of measurement error; instead, they appeared to be separable traits. For example, Dickter et al ( 2018 ) found that autistic traits and traits of SA correlated distinctly and differently with performance on an attentional control (flanker) task and a visual search task, both involving emotional faces.…”