Cognitive processes and social anxiety in adults with ASD

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  An experimental study exploring the relationship between attentional cognitive bias and social anxiety in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

• IRAS ID

  144119

• Contact name

  Samuel Panter

• Contact email

  samuel.panter@uea.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of East Anglia

• Research summary

  Cognitive models maintain that anxiety is underpinned by bias in attention, interpretation and memory. It is a robust finding that in a typically developing population those who are socially anxious have attentional bias to threat related stimuli (Mogg & Bradley, 2002; Musa et al., 2003). Prevalence of anxiety disorders is high in ASD and social anxiety is also common (White et al. 2011). Information processing theories of ASD highlight potential biases rather than deficits (Happé & Frith, 2006). There has been minimal research investigating attentional biases in ASD. To date the only study to have conducted the dot-probe paradigm within the ASD population used faces as stimuli and found no attention bias. The presence and extent of attentional biases in ASD remains unclear, especially the relationship between bias and social anxiety. The use of words as stimuli within the dot probe task also warrants further exploration.
  This is an exploratory study which aims to examine whether attentional bias is present within a group of adults with high functioning ASD using a dot-probe task consisting of both subliminal and supraliminal presentations of words, and to explore the relationship between bias and social anxiety. A correlational design will be used to investigate the research questions consisting of one group of adults with high functioning ASD. Attentional bias will be examined using the dot-probe task, a short one session computer based task. Each participant will undertake the same version of the dot-probe task once.

• REC name

  East of England - Cambridge Central Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  14/EE/0147

• Date of REC Opinion

  24 Apr 2014

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion