Spontaneous instrumental approach-avoidance learning in social contexts in autism.
Autistic women with high autism traits and anxiety or depression pick up social reward patterns more slowly, so target mood first in social-skills training.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Beaurenaut et al. (2024) ran an online game with 60 autistic and 60 neurotypical adults. Players clicked for points. Some pictures gave rewards, others took points away. No one told them the rules. They just played.
The team watched who learned to approach the reward pictures and avoid the loss pictures without help. They also tracked autism traits, anxiety, and depression scores.
What they found
Both groups learned the same amount overall. Autistic adults picked up the pattern just as fast as neurotypical adults.
The twist came when they split by sex. Autistic women with higher autism traits plus anxiety or depression learned more slowly. Autistic men showed no link between traits and learning.
How this fits with other research
Ramos-Cabo et al. (2021) saw teens with intellectual disability bend easily to outside cues. Beaurenaut shows autistic adults can learn fine without cues, so the issue is not simple social sway.
Talebizadeh et al. (2019) found a female-only gene pattern in autism. Beaurenaut’s female-only learning dip matches this biology angle.
van Rijn et al. (2008) reported high social distress in XXY men, another sex-linked profile. Together these papers flag that social stress and biology can intersect differently in females on the spectrum.
Why it matters
If you coach autistic women, check for anxiety or depression. These mood factors can quietly blunt the payoff of natural social feedback. Add brief mood screens to your intake. When scores are high, teach the client to name their feelings first, then practice the social skill. This small front-load keeps your social-skills program from stalling.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a two-question anxiety check before your next social-skills session; if score is high, start with a 2-minute coping-strategy warm-up.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) are characterized by atypicalities in social interactions, compared to Typically Developing individuals (TD). The social motivation theory posits that these difficulties stem from diminished anticipation, reception, and/or learning from social rewards. Although learning from socioemotional outcomes is core to the theory, studies to date have been sparse and inconsistent. This possibly arises from a combination of theoretical, methodological and sample-related issues. Here, we assessed participants’ ability to develop a spontaneous preference for actions that lead to desirable socioemotional outcomes (approaching/avoiding of happy/angry individuals, respectively), in an ecologically valid social scenario. We expected that learning abilities would be impaired in ASC individuals, particularly in response to affiliative social feedback. We ran an online social reinforcement learning task, on two large online cohorts with (n = 274) and without (n = 290) ASC, matched for gender, age and education. Participants had to indicate where they would sit in a waiting room. Each seat was associated with different probabilities of approaching/avoiding emotional individuals. Importantly, the task was implicit, as participants were not instructed to learn, and emotional expressions were never mentioned. We applied both categorical analyses contrasting the ASC and TD groups and dimensional factor analysis on affective questionnaires. Contrary to our hypothesis, participants showed spontaneous learning from socioemotional outcomes, regardless of their diagnostic group. Yet, when accounting for dimensional variations in autistic traits, as well as depression and anxiety, two main findings emerged among females who failed to develop explicit learning strategies: (1) autism severity in ASC correlated with reduced learning to approach happy individuals; (2) anxiety-depression severity across both ASC and TD participants correlated with reduced learning to approach/avoid happy/angry individuals, respectively. Implicit spontaneous learning from socioemotional outcomes is not generally impaired in autism but may be specifically associated with autism severity in females with ASC, when they do not have an explicit strategy for adapting to their social environment. Clinical diagnosis and intervention ought to take into account individual differences in their full complexity, including the presence of co-morbid anxiety and depression, when dealing with social atypicalities in autism. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13229-024-00610-8.
Molecular Autism, 2024 · doi:10.1186/s13229-024-00610-8