RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Have It, Know It, but Don’t Show It: Examining Physiological Arousal, Anxiety, and Facial Expressions over the Course of a Social Skills Intervention for Autistic Adolescents
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 582676
DO 10.1101/582676
A1 Niharika Jain
A1 Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed
A1 Serdar Bozdag
A1 Bridget K. Dolan
A1 Alana J. McVey
A1 Kirsten S. Willar
A1 Sheryl S. Pleiss
A1 Christina C. Murphy
A1 Christina L. Casnar
A1 Stephanie Potts
A1 Daniel Cibich
A1 Kylie Nelsen-Freund
A1 Dana Fernandez
A1 Illeana Hernandez
A1 Amy Vaughan Van Hecke
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/25/582676.1.abstract
AB 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 autistic adolescents’ facial expressions indicated arousal (“show-it”), and 3) determine whether autistic adolescents were self-aware of their anxiety (“know-it”). Our results showed that autistic adolescents’ self-rated anxiety was significantly associated with peaks in EDA. Both machine learning algorithms and human participant-based methods, however, had low accuracy in predicting autistic adolescents’ arousal state from facial expressions, suggesting that autistic adolescent’s facial expressions 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.