Pupil response to social-emotional material is associated with rumination and depressive symptoms in adults with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

BackgroundAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) is marked by repetitive thinking and high rates of depression. Understanding the extent to which repetitive negative thinking in ASD reflects autistic stereotypy versus general depressive thinking patterns (e.g., rumination) could help guide treatment research to improve emotional health in ASD. We compared associations between rumination, depressive symptoms, and pupil response to social-emotional material in adults with ASD and typically developing (TD) adults with and without depression.MethodsN = 53 verbally fluent young adults were recruited to three cohorts: ASD, n = 21; TD-depressed, n = 13; never-depressed TD-controls, n = 19. Participants completed Ruminative Response Scale and Beck Depression Inventory self-reports and a passive-viewing task employing emotionally-expressive faces, during which pupillary motility was assessed to quantify cognitive-affective load. Main and interactive effects of cohort, emotion condition, and time on pupil amplitude were tested via a linear mixed effects analysis of variance using restricted maximum likelihood estimation. Similar procedures were used to test for effects of rumination and depressive symptoms on pupil amplitude over time within ASD.ResultsResponsive pupil dilation in the ASD cohort tended to be significantly lower than TD-depressed initially but increased to comparable levels by trial end. When viewing sad faces, individuals with ASD who had higher depression scores resembled TD-depressed participants’ faster, larger, and sustained pupil response. Within ASD, depressive symptoms uniquely predicted early pupil response to sad faces, while rumination and depression scores each independently predicted sustained pupil response.ConclusionsPeople with elevated depressive symptoms appear to have faster and greater increases in pupil-indexed neural activation following sad stimuli, regardless of ASD status, suggesting the utility of conceptualizing rumination as depression-like in treatment. Ruminative processes may increase more slowly in ASD, suggesting the potential utility of interventions that decrease reactions before they are uncontrollable. Findings also reinforce the importance of testing for effects of internalizing variables in broader ASD research.

Visual Behavior, Pupil Dilation, and Ability to Identify Emotions From Facial Expressions After Stroke

“…Prior to the computation of pupil dilation, the pupil data were pre-processed, as follows. First, those images or baselines that presented a ratio of missing data >50% in either eye were discarded (23,60,62,63). Second, the first 2 s of the stimuli were also discarded to remove the initial pupil contraction (60).…”

“…Third, the non-physiological variations in pupil size, identified as those changes occurring at a faster rate than 5 mm/s, were removed. Fourth, the remaining time windows of missing data were linearly interpolated (23,62,63). Fifth, the time series were low-pass filtered at 8.3 Hz to reveal the low-frequency trend (23,62).…”

Measuring Depression in Autistic Adults: Psychometric Validation of the Beck Depression Inventory–II

“…Participants with ASD were drawn primarily from the Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge (SPARK) cohort, a U.S.-based online community that allows people with ASD and their families to participate in ASD research studies (Feliciano et al, 2018). These data were combined with a well-characterized community sample of adults with and without ASD who completed paper-and-pencil BDI-II forms as part of laboratory studies conducted at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Gotham et al, 2018;Han et al, 2019;Unruh et al, 2018). To construct a sample of TD adults large enough for adequate DIF testing, BDI-II data from a general population comparison group were drawn from four online studies of cognitive biases and depressive symptoms that recruited participants using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk;Everaert et al, 2018Everaert et al, , 2020Everaert & Joormann, 2019).…”

Depression in Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…• Age: Evidence suggests that the risk for depression in ASD increases in adolescence, 1,21,22 similar to patterns observed in the general population. 11 Adult ASD depression rates are significantly higher still than child rates in ASD 1 (several studies report lifetime depression rates ranging from 50% to 77% in adults with ASD 28,29 ), which provides context for the importance of recognizing and treating this issue at younger ages.…”