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An intervention focused on emotion regulation can help autistic teens and young adults significantly reduce their daily impairments to living, reports a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
“Clinically elevated emotion dysregulation, difficulty monitoring and modifying emotional arousal and reactivity, is 2-4 times more likely among autistic people than non-autistic peers,” wrote Susan W. White, Ph.D., of the University of Alabama, and colleagues. “… [E]motion dysregulation may be particularly interfering during transition to adulthood, acknowledged to be a primary barrier to desired social, employment, and educational outcomes.”
What’s more, as emotion dysregulation is associated with many psychiatric disorders, a therapy focused on this problem might be less intimidating to non-autism specialists, the authors continued.
White and colleagues randomized 109 adolescents and young adults (ages 12 to 22) with autism to receive one of two therapies. Fifty-seven participants received Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement (EASE), a 16-module program rooted in mindfulness that teaches individuals to become more aware of and better regulate their emotions. The other 52 participants received an active control in which therapists could perform a range of evidence-based interventions over 16 weeks, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or social skills intervention, as long as they didn’t include any core elements of EASE.
After 16 weeks, youth in the EASE group had significantly greater improvements in symptoms related to emotion regulation than the active control group. Overall, 63% of EASE participants showed strong improvements in their daily functioning, compared with 44% receiving the active control. Though the difference was not statistically significant, “these findings are noteworthy given the robust nature of the [control], in which clients received personalized treatment designed to meet the person’s specific needs,” the authors wrote.
EASE participants also showed statistically significant improvements in internalizing and externalizing symptoms from baseline, whereas only the latter improved in the active control group. EASE also demonstrated superiority on the therapist side, receiving higher ratings on patient engagement and building a therapeutic alliance than the active control group.
For related information, see the Psychiatric News article "As Number of Adults With Autism Rise, Need For Better Services Apparent."
(Image: Getty Images/iStock/SeventyFour)
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