Physiologic Responses to Emotion-Eliciting Task for Children with ASD

Background:

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty regulating emotion (Baron-Cohen, 2002). Emotion-eliciting tasks are often used to assess these skills. For example, The Children’s Gambling Task (CGT; Kerr & Zelazo, 2004), an affective decision-making task, requires children choose between two stacks of cards that vary based on rewards and losses. The inherent failure feedback provided during this task requires children to successfully regulate their emotions in order to persevere and succeed. Some children perform well throughout the task despite negative feedback while others initially perform well but their performance drops off during the task.  It is important to understand factors that may influence these different response patterns. No research to date has looked specifically at cardiac functioning in response to the CGT for children with typical development (TD) or ASD.

Children with ASD typically show varied cardiac functioning when compared to their TD peers (Ming et al, 2005). Specific to emotion regulation, research suggests that vagal tone, a measure of parasympathetic influence on the heart, is associated with the ability to self-sooth (Porges, 2007). Researchers have observed that children with ASD tend to exhibit less variable heart rate and lower baseline vagal tone than children with TD. These issues may functionally make it more difficult for them to adapt to various contexts and successfully regulate their emotions (Althaus et al., 2004). 

Objectives:  

The current study aims to document differences in cardiac functioning between children with ASD and those with TD. Additionally, we plan to investigate potential differences in cardiac functioning profiles based on different response patterns elicited by the CGT. 

Methods:  

Sixty-three children between the ages of 3:3 and 7:2 participated in the current study. Children’s cardiac functioning will be compared between a baseline and a challenge condition. During the baseline phase, the children listened to a neutral story while cardiac data were collected. Next, during the challenge phase, children completed the CGT. Cardiac data from the task will be compared with baseline measures offline. Inter-beat interval, heart rate variability, and vagal tone will be calculated from these data. 

Results:  

We anticipate that our ASD group will display decreased heart rate variability and vagal tone. Further, we expect cardiac functioning across both groups to predict the distinctive response patterns observed in the CGT. Specifically, in the ASD sample, we expect reduced heart rate variability and vagal tone to relate to disadvantageous decision-making on the CGT. 

Conclusions:  

We expect to find that children with greater heart rate variability and vagal tone are able to successfully regulate their emotions more effectively and persevere with advantageous decision-making following failure feedback.

The clinical implications of these findings underscore the importance of teaching self-regulation strategies and coping skills to children with ASD during intervention. These skills may help counteract their reduced physiological functioning and serve to increase their success in a variety of challenging contexts.