A Scoping Review on Positive Emotions and Affect in Autism

Autism research has primarily emphasized difficulties with negative affect, while positive emotions remain underexplored despite its central role in well-being and social functioning. This scoping review synthesizes existing evidence on positive emotions and affect in autism, focusing on the recognition, experience, and regulation of positive emotions as well as relevant interventions.

Using the Arksey & O'Malley (2005) framework and PRISMA-ScR (Peters et al., 2020; Tricco et al., 2018), we included 29 studies from 1,119 database records and added 43 manually identified papers (72 in all).

Results for positive emotions in autism are variable relative to their neurotypical peers. However, they do not point to overall group differences; instead, results suggest that potential difficulties depend on the specific emotion, the stage of emotional processing, perceptual approaches, cognitive and social capacities, and contextual factors.

These findings call for future studies to sample a wider range of positive emotions and processes as well as using tasks and measures that account for the individual in a more ecological context. Deepening our understanding of positive emotional processes in autism may reveal potential psychological strengths as well as inform tailored interventions.