Understanding Emotional Flexibility in Autism: The Social Factor Matters

Abstract

Autistic individuals often present difficulties in flexibly adjusting their behavior, yet laboratory experiments have yielded inconsistent results, potentially due to various influencing factors requiring precise examination. This study aimed to investigate the hypothesis that the social content of stimuli could play a specific role in some of the flexibility challenges faced by autistic individuals. We analyzed data from 256 adult participants (124 with autism), matched in age, gender, and sex, who performed an emotional shifting task involving unpredictable shifts between positive and negative stimuli. In addition, the task had a social and a non-social condition. Our results revealed a larger switch cost in the social compared to the non-social condition, which was more pronounced in autism compared to non-autistic individuals. Expanding upon previous research demonstrating a greater switch cost in autistic than non-autistic individuals for socio-emotional stimuli, our study further extends these findings by highlighting that the social context, rather than the emotional nature of the stimuli alone, could play a particular role in some of the flexibility challenges faced by autistic individuals. Nevertheless, further studies are needed to investigate if these results also apply to autistic children or autistic individuals who also have intellectual disabilities.