Associations between autistic traits, depression, social anxiety and social rejection in autistic and non-autistic adults.

Autistic people frequently experience negative judgements from non-autistic people, often fuelled by misconceptions that autistic people lack empathy. Understanding responses to negative social judgement among autistic people is crucial because of the potential negative impact on wellbeing and future interactions. We investigated the role of autistic traits, social anxiety, and depression on behavioural indices of social rejection in 20 autistic (AUT; 11 males) and 40 non-autistic (N-AUT; 21 males) university students. Participants completed the Social Judgement Task (SJT) where they predicted whether they were liked by another person, then received feedback on whether those evaluations were correct. Participants also completed an Age Judgement Task (AJT) where they estimated the age of the pictured person. The AUT group had lower positive expectation scores, meaning less tendency to predict being liked. Across the whole sample, higher social anxiety predicted greater tendency to anticipate rejection from others, not autistic traits. These findings suggest early experiences of rejection might lead to a negative self-bias in autistic people and emphasise the importance of using a transdiagnostic approach by showing that social anxiety rather than autistic traits is associated with expectation of social rejection.

Learning from the experts: Evaluating a participatory autism and universal design training for university educators.

LAY ABSTRACT: Autistic university students have many strengths. They also go through difficulties that professors may not understand. Professors may not understand what college life is like for autistic students. They might judge autistic students. A team of autistic and non-autistic researchers made a training to help professors understand autistic students better. This training also gave professors ideas to help them teach all of their students. Ninety-eight professors did an online survey before the autism training. They shared how they felt about autism and teaching. Before our training, professors who knew more about autism appreciated autism more. Professors who thought people should be equal and women also appreciated autism more. Then, 89 of the professors did our training and another survey after the training. This helped us see what they learned from the training. They did one more survey a month later. This helped us see what they remembered. Our training helped professors understand and value autism. It also helped them understand how they can teach all students better. The professors remembered a lot of what we taught them. This study shows that a training that autistic people helped make can help professors understand their autistic students better.

University Students with Autism: The Social and Academic Experiences of University in the UK.

The number of university students with autism is increasing, and it is crucial that these students can access adequate support. An online questionnaire was completed by 26 autistic students and 158 non-autistic students enrolled at UK universities to investigate social and academic experiences. Autistic students self-reported significant challenges and more mental health difficulties than non-autistic students. Significant challenges focused on the social components of university life, including social skills, social support opportunities, and levels of ASD awareness from others. Many strengths were also reported regarding academic skills of autistic university students. Importantly, there were more thoughts of withdrawal by the students with autism highlighting the need for support. These data can inform university student support services.

Social Attention and Emotional Responsiveness in Young Adults With Autism.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are generally characterized by marked impairments in processing of social emotional information, but less is known about emotion processing in adults with the disorder. This study aimed to address this by collecting data on social attention (eye tracking), emotional arousal (skin conductance level, SCL), and emotional awareness (self-report) in a paradigm with social emotional video clips. Fifty-two young, intelligent adults with ASD (IQrange = 88-130, Agerange = 18-24) and 31 typically developing (TD) ASD (IQrange = 94-139, Agerange = 19-28) gender matched controls participated and reported on severity of autism symptoms [Social Responsiveness Scale for Adults (SRS-A)]. Results showed no group difference in social attention, while autism symptom severity was related to decreased attention to faces across participants (r = -.32). Average SCL was lower in the ASD group, but no group difference in arousal reactivity (change from baseline to emotional phases) was detected. Lower SCL during video clips was related to autism symptom severity across participants (r = -.29). ASD individuals reported lower emotional awareness. We conclude that, even though no deviations in social attention or emotional reactivity were found in ASD, an overall lower level of social attention and arousal may help explain difficulties in social functioning in ASD.

Optimal time discrimination.

In the temporal bisection task, participants categorize experienced stimulus durations as short or long based on their similarity to previously acquired reference durations. Reward maximization in this task requires integrating endogenous timing uncertainty as well as exogenous probabilities of the reference durations into temporal judgements. We tested human participants on the temporal bisection task with different short and long reference duration probabilities (exogenous probability) in two separate test sessions. Incorrect categorizations were not penalized in Experiment 1 but were penalized in Experiment 2, leading to different levels of stringency in the reward functions that participants tried to maximize. We evaluated the judgements within the framework of optimality. Our participants adapted their choice behaviour in a nearly optimal fashion and earned nearly the maximum possible expected gain they could attain given their level of endogenous timing uncertainty and exogenous probabilities in both experiments. These results point to the optimality of human temporal risk assessment in the temporal bisection task. The long categorization response times (RTs) were overall faster than short categorization RTs, and short but not long categorization RTs were modulated by reference duration probability manipulations. These observations suggested an asymmetry between short and long categorizations in the temporal bisection task.