A mixed method examination: how stigma experienced by autistic adults relates to metrics of social identity and social functioning.

A recent meta-analysis reveals almost half of autistic individuals experience some form of victimization in their lifetime, including bullying and other forms of stigma. Research among caregivers of autistic individuals demonstrates that stigma can have a long-lasting impact on other aspects of a social identity, such as self-esteem, but less research has specifically examined this among autistic adults themselves, in spite of research suggesting these are likely constructs that contribute to the internalization of stigma and subsequent mental health consequences. The current study used a mixed method approach to assess the relation between stigma and several components of social identity and social functioning. More specifically, among 45 autistic young adults, three dimensions of self-reported stigma (discrimination, disclosure, and positive aspects) were examined in relation to self-esteem, self-efficacy, social satisfaction and adaptive social functioning. Quantitative analyses revealed higher reported discriminative and disclosure stigma were significantly associated with lower self-efficacy. Increased experience with all types of stigma were associated with lower social satisfaction. Greater reported disclosure stigma was also associated with lower self-esteem. Qualitative interviewing among eight autistic young adults helped to better understand the nature of stigma and the impact of these experiences. Thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed that all of the participants experienced stigma in the form of exclusion or isolation and that a majority also experienced verbal bullying. Many of the negative interactions came from educators, peers, and family members. Most participants indicated that these stigmatizing interactions directly contributed to decreased social satisfaction, diminished self-efficacy, and lowered self-esteem. A greater understanding of the negative consequences of stigma can inform efforts to increase awareness and acceptance of autism.

The controllability of aversive and neutral pictures: an event-related potential study.

Control over physically aversive stimuli may reduce stress, arousal and physiological responses to these stimuli. Nonetheless, avoidance of emotionally aversive stimuli/excessive attempts to control negative emotion might alternatively increase the salience of these stimuli. Here, we used a novel paradigm to examine the effect of controllability on the processing of aversive and neutral pictures (using the late positive potential, LPP) and response uncertainty (using the post-imperative negative variation, PINV). Participants (n = 48) were told that they could press a button to terminate the presentation of an aversive or neutral picture, but this was only true during some blocks of the experiment and not others. Results showed that the LPP was larger for control compared to no control blocks and that this was driven by larger LPPs to aversive pictures during the first control block, but only for participants who had started the task in a no control block. Therefore, knowing that aversive stimuli might not always be controllable (i.e., a prior experience of uncontrollability) appears to increase the motivational salience of these stimuli once control becomes possible. In addition, uncontrollability increased both the early and late PINV, and the late PINV was larger for the second compared to the first control block. As such, the current study provides the first evidence that the PINV can be elicited using aversive and neutral pictures and suggests functional differentiation between the early and late portions of the PINV. Results support the utility of this novel paradigm for examining control over emotional stimuli.

Complexity of visual icons studied via signal detection theory.

Two investigations on how humans perceive information from visually rendered complex objects, such as military icons (glyphs) were conducted. A signal detection theory framework was employed to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of human subject performance. The 6 adults tested showed that as complexity increased, their accuracy in performance decreased. Study 1 showed that complex dimensions (features) could not be assigned arbitrarily. Study 2 developed a rank ordering for features of an iconic object.

Distractor heterogeneity, attention, and color in visual search.

Experiments were designed to investigate the effects of set size and variation in the chromaticity of distractor stimuli on thresholds for detecting a target stimulus that differed from distractors only in chromaticity. Distractor chromaticities were selected from a line in the isoluminant color plane and targets were selected from lines approximately orthogonal to the distractor line. With uniform distractors thresholds increased with set size as predicted by a signal detection model. When targets and distractors were selected from lines parallel to the Cardinal directions in color space, thresholds were lower with variable distractors than with uniform distractors and variations in the location of the target along the distractor line had no effect on threshold. Results with diagonally oriented distractor lines were similar. Results suggest that many pairs of orthogonal directions in the isoluminant color plane represent independent color coding mechanisms that mediate search. Results also show that information in independent color coding mechanisms tuned to orthogonal directions in the isoluminant plane can be combined to facilitate detection of the target.