Have It, Know It, but Do Not Show It: Examining Physiological Arousal, Anxiety, and Facial Expressions over the Course of a Social Skills Intervention for Autistic Adolescents

Facial expressions provide a nonverbal mechanism for social communication, a core challenge for autistic people. Little is known regarding the association between arousal, self-report of anxiety, and facial expressions among autistic adolescents. Therefore, this study investigated session-by-session...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inbioRxiv
Main Authors Jain, Niharika, Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, Bozdag, Serdar, Dolan, Bridget K, Mcvey, Alana J, Willar, Kirsten S, Pleiss, Sheryl S, Murphy, Christina C, Casnar, Christina L, Potts, Stephanie, Cibich, Daniel, Nelsen-Freund, Kylie, Fernandez, Dana, Hernandez, Illeana, Amy Vaughan Van Hecke
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Cold Spring Harbor Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 25.03.2019
Subjects
Adolescents
Anxiety
Arousal
Autism
Learning algorithms
Physiology
Psychological aspects
Teenagers
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Facial expressions provide a nonverbal mechanism for social communication, a core challenge for autistic people. Little is known regarding the association between arousal, self-report of anxiety, and facial expressions among autistic adolescents. Therefore, this study investigated session-by-session facial expressions, self-report of anxiety, and physiological arousal via Electrodermal Activity (EDA), of 12 autistic male adolescents in a didactic social skills intervention setting. The goals of this study were threefold: 1) identify physiological arousal levels ("have-it"), 2) examine if the facial expressions of autistic adolescents indicated arousal ("show-it"), and 3) determine whether autistic adolescents were self-aware of their anxiety ("know-it"). Our results showed that self-rated anxiety of autistic adolescents was significantly associated with peaks in EDA. Both machine learning algorithms and human participant-based methods, however, had low accuracy in predicting arousal state of autistic adolescents from facial expressions, suggesting that facial expressions of autistic adolescents did not coincide with their arousal. Implications for understanding social communication difficulties among autistic adolescents, as well as future targets for intervention, are discussed. This project is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, Identifier: NCT02680015.
DOI:10.1101/582676