Neural features of sustained emotional information processing in autism spectrum disorder

Many individuals with autism spectrum disorder struggle with emotions that are intense and interfering, which is referred to as emotion dysregulation. Prior research has established that individuals with autism may be more likely than individuals who are not autistic to have repetitive thoughts. It is possible that persistent thoughts about negative or distressing stimuli may contribute to emotion dysregulation in autism spectrum disorder. This study aimed to identify areas of the brain with evidence of persistent processing of negative information via functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging. We used a task that alternated between emotional processing of personally relevant negative words, neutral words, and a non-emotional task. Criteria were developed to define heightened and persistent emotional processing, and analyses were conducted to identify all brain regions satisfying these criteria. Participants included 25 adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and 23 typically developing adolescents who were similar to the autism spectrum disorder group in IQ, age, and gender ratios. Brain regions identified as having greater and continued processing following negative stimuli in the autism spectrum disorder group as compared with the typically developing group included the salience network and the prefrontal dorsolateral cortex. These areas have been previously implicated in emotion dysregulation outside of autism spectrum disorder. Collectively, brain activity in the identified regions was associated with parent-reported emotion dysregulation in the autism spectrum disorder group. These results help to identify a potential process in the brain associated with emotion dysregulation in autism spectrum disorder. This information may be useful for the development of treatments to decrease emotion dysregulation in autism spectrum disorder.