Mechanisms of anxiety related attentional biases in children with autism spectrum disorder.
Anxious autistic kids do not show the threat-stare bias seen in typical anxiety, so treat the autism-specific signs, not the eye gaze.
01Research in Context
What this study did
May et al. (2015) tracked eye movements of cognitively able kids with autism and matched peers.
They showed faces with angry, happy, or neutral expressions on a screen.
The goal was to see if anxious autistic kids stare longer at threatening faces.
What they found
Autistic kids reported high anxiety, but their eyes did not stick to angry faces.
Both anxious and non-anxious autistic kids looked the same as typical kids.
Attention bias is not the engine of anxiety in autism.
How this fits with other research
Wilson et al. (2019) ran a near-copy eye-tracking study and also found no disengagement deficit, a direct replication.
Adams et al. (2019) asked parents to describe anxiety at home; parents saw shutdowns and pacing, not face staring, extending the lab null into real life.
Rojahn et al. (2012) showed that insistence on sameness, not face watching, flags anxiety in autism, supporting the same mechanistic picture.
Why it matters
Stop assuming autistic anxiety works like typical anxiety. You will not spot it by watching for threat stare. Use parent and teacher reports of behavior change across settings, then target sameness routines and sensory triggers, not attention retraining.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have high levels of anxiety. It is unclear whether they exhibit threat-related attentional biases commensurate with anxiety disorders as manifest in non-ASD populations, such as facilitated attention toward, and difficulties disengaging engaging from, threatening stimuli. Ninety children, 45 cognitively able with ASD and 45 age, perceptual-IQ, and gender matched typically developing children, aged 7-12 years, were administered a visual dot probe task using threatening facial pictures. Parent-reported anxiety symptoms were also collected. Children with ASD showed similarly high levels of anxiety compared with normative data from an anxiety disordered sample. Children with ASD had higher levels of parent-reported anxiety but did not show differences in disengaging from, or facilitated attention toward, threatening facial stimuli compared with typically developing children. In contrast to previously published studies of anxious children, in this study there were no differences in attentional biases in children with ASD meeting clinical cutoff for anxiety and those who did not. There were no correlations between attentional biases and anxiety symptoms and no gender differences. These findings indicate the cognitive mechanisms underlying anxiety in cognitively able children with ASD could differ from those commonly found in anxious children which may have implications for both understanding the aetiology of anxiety in ASD and for anxiety interventions.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2015 · doi:10.1007/s10803-015-2500-z