Psychophysiology of Emotion Dysregulation in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (2012)
Undergraduates: Dillon Cockrell, Anna Sabatino
Faculty Advisor: Gabriel Dichter
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience
The emotional difficulties of individuals with Autism are well researched and documented. The focus of my research project was to use psychophysiological methods to examine the effects of cognitive strategies in the assessment of emotional dysregulation in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders. We pursued this project in hopes of determining whether the emotional struggles of Autistic individuals could be improved using a cognitive approach. With this goal, we hypothesized that delivering an auditory command to “Think Positive” or “Think Negative” in conjunction with different visual stimuli would result in normalized psychophysiological responses of the individuals. In order to test our hypothesis, we measured the emotional responses of autistic participants to certain stimuli with and without the auditory command directing them to think positively or negatively against a control group. Although analysis is ongoing, preliminary results support the hypothesis that the dysregulated emotional responses may be consciously modulated to be closer to those of control participants.