Citation

White SW, Maddox BB, Panneton RK. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 2015; 45(11): 3446-3457.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology (0436), Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA, sww@vt.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10803-014-2349-6

PMID

25578337

Abstract

Social anxiety is common among adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this modest-sized pilot study, we examined the relationship between social worries and gaze patterns to static social stimuli in adolescents with ASD (n = 15) and gender-matched adolescents without ASD (control; n = 18). Among cognitively unimpaired adolescents with ASD, self-reported fear of negative evaluation predicted greater gaze duration to social threat cues (i.e., faces depicting disgust and anger). By comparison, there was no relationship between self-reported social fears and gaze duration in the controls. These findings call attention to the potential import of the impact of co-occurring psychopathology such as social anxiety, and particularly fear of negative evaluation, on social attention and cognition with adolescents who have ASD.

Language: en