The salience of the self: Self-referential processing and internalizing problems in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.
Autistic youth who see themselves negatively and recall fewer self-facts report more anxiety and depression, so boosting positive self-memory may ease internalizing symptoms.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked 8- to young learners with autism to rate themselves on traits like "smart" or "shy." They later tested how many of those self-words the kids recalled.
Parents also filled out anxiety and depression checklists. The goal was to see if weak self-memory and harsh self-views predict internalizing problems.
What they found
Kids who gave themselves fewer positive ratings remembered fewer self-related words. That double hit forecast higher anxiety and depression scores.
Surprisingly, the link was strongest for children who still recalled some self-words. Feeling bad about yourself hurts more when you can actually remember the evidence.
How this fits with other research
Older mirror studies (G et al. 1984, E et al. 2009) showed most autistic kids recognize their face. Bao et al. (2017) agrees self-recognition is intact, but adds the emotional part—how much you like that face—is dampened and clinically important.
Levin et al. (2014) found poorer memory for social words in autism. The new study narrows the focus: memory suffers most when the words are about the self, not just any social content.
Jones et al. (2010) spotted shaky memory awareness for faces. Here, the weakness is in encoding traits as "about me," linking the monitoring gap to mood, not just recall accuracy.
Why it matters
You no longer need to wonder if self-esteem work is worth the time for autistic clients. These data say poor self-views and spotty self-memory ride along with anxiety and depression. Build in activities that let the child store positive self-facts—strength lists, video self-modeling, or pride journals—and revisit them often so the good stuff sticks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate atypical processing of, and memory for, self-referenced information, which may contribute to the heightened rates of co-occurring internalizing problems. We assessed affective and cognitive aspects of self-referential processing in verbally-fluent children with ASD (N = 79), and an age-matched comparison sample (COM, N = 73) of children without an autism diagnosis. We examined group differences in these two aspects of the self-system, and their joint contributions to individual differnces in internalizing problems. Using a self-referenced memory (SRM) task, participants indicated whether a series of positive and negative trait adjectives described themselves and a well-known fictional character. Participants were then surprised with a recognition memory test on the same adjectives. Overall, individuals with ASD showed a reduction in the extent to which they preferentially endorsed positive over negative trait adjectives about themselves, and a reduction in their preferential memory for self- over other-referenced information. Across the full sample, these two aspects of self-referential processing jointly predicted self-reported internalizing problems. Specifically, self-evaluations were strongly and inversely associated with internalizing problems but only for children with relatively high SRM. These findings suggest that the salience of the self influences the extent to which affective self-evaluations impact emotional functioning for youth both with and without ASD. Implications for basic (e.g., developmental) and translational (e.g., intervention) research are discussed. Autism Res 2017, 10: 949-960. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1016/j.bpsc.2016.04.006