The potential of exercise to benefit and harm social-cognitive abilities.

03Original abstract

Our article provides insights into the acute effects of exercise on the inhibition of emotional information in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (Ludyga et al., 2024) and Huang et al. highlight different questions that stimulate the discussion of exercise-induced effects in this target group. One important question relates to the heterogeneous profiles of ASD, which increase the likeliness of individual responses to an exercise session. We addressed this question in a subanalysis, which showed that only 3 of 30 participants had an improvement in accuracy on happy Go trials following exercise, whereas null and negative effects were found in 9 and 18 participants, respectively. This supports the lack of any detrimental effects in a smaller proportion of the sample, which was characterized by a tendency towards higher baseline performance on the emotional Go/NoGo task. Based on these findings, teachers and practitioners should be sensitized that interventions including an exercise component can temporarily aggravate difficulties in the processing of emotional information, which may also affect social interaction. This highlights the need to consider the level and type of social interaction as key elements in the design of exercise interventions. However, we have only a limited understanding on whether these elements play a similar role across different exercise types and intensities and if exercise characteristics interact with difficulties in the processing of social information. Evidence from participants without an ASD diagnosis links an increasing parasympathetic withdrawal, which is more pronounced during exercise at higher intensity, with a decrease in the ability to process and recognize emotions (Quintana et al., 2012). Independent from intensity, it remains a matter of debate whether the perception of exercise as stress or unpleasant experience may complicate the processing of social information. While investigating the acute effects of exercise enhances our understanding of the interplay of the physiological state and social cognition, Huang et al. raise the question how immediate changes relate to long-term effects. In a conceptual model, we proposed that exercise can influence aspects of social cognition by acting on pathways that evolved to deal with complex social systems (Ludyga et al., 2022). Specifically, regular exercise can promote autonomic balance and act on social brain networks, which in turn can translate into better social-cognitive abilities. Evidence in support of this model has mainly been drawn from endurance exercise. We also prescribed this type of exercise in our study and negative effects for the processing of facial emotions do not exclude a different long-term response. For example, we previously found that coordinative demands during acute exercise can cancel benefits in executive function in children with ADHD (Ludyga et al., 2017), whereas meta-analytical findings have reported long-term improvements in this domain across different exercise types (L iang et al., 2021). Despite the overlap between executive function and social cognition, research on exercise-induced cognitive effects has rarely considered the latter. For children with ASD in particular, future research investigating the effects of different exercise programs on social cognition is necessary to gauge their potential for therapeutic approaches.

Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2025 · doi:10.1002/aur.3288