Research Project: Emotion Regulation in ASD

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No worries Rascal77s! The neurology of ASD is an interest of mine

ill definately fill it out later im not at home right now

I do like online surveys, this looks like something potentially interesting to participate in...I don't have an official diagnoses of aspergers but I strongly suspect I have it as did my last therapist and my sisters the one who brought it up to me, I said I have one of depression but I am not 100% if so I would have gotten it when I was 15 but I am not sure if it was actually official.

I've just completed your survey. I'd be very interested in the results so please do post them when you finish your study! Good luck with it

I would like to see the results also. Could you post the results link on WP after sept. 1 Damiano?

If you want data on coping strategies, you should ask us old fogeys

I do find it frustrating that there is so little information on how Autism interacts with advancing old age.

After I launched the survey, I realised I probably should have allowed for an option to state whether you don't have a diagnosis but suspect you have a diagnosis. Unfortunately once the survey was launched and people started taking it I couldn't change it otherwise it would invalidate the data I already had. At the moment if people say they have a diagnosis there is a "self diagnosis" option there, but I will also be looking at AQ scores to differentiate ASD from non-ASD.



Yes I originally wanted to include all ages Unfortunately though because my PhD topic is emotion regulation in adolescents and young adults, my supervisors advised against it because in the end we wouldn't be using the data for this project. However, this is a step away from children, so I think if this project is successful there is a chance another project in the future may focus on adults above this age bracket.

Also thanks Ravenclawgurl and JoeRose for taking it! Rascal77s I'll post the results on this thread once the study has been concluded

Just want to say I liked that you have a page of links for AS support and info, including a link to WP, at the end of your survey. I hope everyone here who meets the criteria fills out your survey.

Thanks Rascal77s, I think WP is an important and useful resource for individuals with ASD. I see a lot of people posting on these forums for support and advice, and so I didn't think twice about including it as a resource for people to access.

[Bumped on behalf of the OP, who needs to recruit more participants]

@Damiano:

I was hoping that there would be a comment textbox on the last page so that you can tell more about yourself and your answers and if there is anything special to consider. In my case:

I am very emotionally detached from myself and have acquired unusual mechanisms of emotional control in my life, such as tuning down, so to say 'at the push of a button', any emotional response entirely without any other causality to it. Many more suppression mechanisms exist which aren't respected in your questionnaire, such as balancing any single emotional response by 'holistic' emotional control or by directly replacing emotions with rational thought or by generating other emotions (again without any further causality to it, like thinking differently about a situation ... e.g. you feel a person did evil to you but simultaneously know that circumstances aren't that way, hence correct the emotion like mentioned. Result: you consistently thought the same way about the situation and just corrected a false emotional impulse on-the-fly in between which would have possibly interfered negatively with yourself otherwise. So to say you prevent emotions from emerging in the first place by always keeping rationally coherent emotional responses - even if - the initial response isn't wrong in itself you can predict the causality of it and thereby exercise control to maintain coherency).
I respect my emotions only in the sense of keeping them away from interfering with my own aims, which are oriented entirely rationally except there is an absolute necessity that I need to respect instinctual or emotional urges. I cannot properly suppress/control emotions related to my sexuality, like I can with all other emotions, that is mating instincts and related influences on emotions and thought. I am somewhat close to alexithymia and have motivational problems because of that (suppress everything = lose any kind of 'drive' to do something). My emotions are generally pretty random, don't make any sense whatsoever and are so strong that I need to use such sophisticated levels of emotional control more or less all the time.
I e.g. use negative emotions such as anxiety and hatred for the positive and positive emotions can often cause more negative interference than good (which is why I also put effort in down-tuning them). Positive emotions also tend to lower my concentration long-term and anxiety and stress increase it very effectively, which is why the latter two are eventually beneficial in me. The exception to everything is again, mating instinct, which I cannot control. I look at women and think about women often and feel instinctually very positive about it, without my consent, but ultimately circumstances are such that I cannot integrate relationships with women such that I would get a net-positive benefit out of it. So I have a deficit there that causes frustration all the time and which is constantly reinvoked by such instinctual thoughts and emotions, which are in itself positive (and the main target regarding positive emotion in your questionnaire in my case). Also I don't even have positive/negative emotions as opposites, it is just common convention to me that they are, but not in me.

That all entirely breaks the causality in the very vast majority of your questions. I tried to answer them as good as I can though, but I doubt that they make any sense inside the questionnaire. I guess you should adapt somehow the questionnaire to account for unusual coping mechanisms regarding emotions, because I believe those exist in one form or the other in the majority of autistic people. I believe that we are neurologically so different that our normal thoughts and emotions don't make proper sense effectively in interaction with other people and that we experience extreme levels of stress, by other people unnoticed/unintended sensory and social torture and intense anxiety from an early age on and that therefore some kind of unusual emotional adaption must be implemented in the childhood of any autistic person in order to cope with such circumstances. Maybe it is lost in some as we grow up or even not ever learned.

Also your questionnaire contains typos and some questions don't make any or only little sense, e.g.:
"I often feel that I wouldn’t care if I died." - there is only one answer to that question: 100% agree because you simply can't care if you wouldn't exist; in the case it refers to the process of dying: depends on the method of suicide (opioid overdose: you wouldn't care at all, bleeding to death: it would hurt a lot, so you would care about that if you wan't to or not)
"I usually don’t plan ahead and will leave assignments or tasks to the last minute." - I plan ahead everything, but I leave tasks to the last minute - the result is a neutral answer because both things cancel each other out.


Also your site looks a lot like the typical fraud page, except that the URL is valid at first sight. I suppose you could change the layout and resize the huge prize image so that it doesn't leave that impression so much.

In case you want to know which questions were mine: I was the one who wrote that I have experience with over 50 different drugs.

Best of luck to you and your team in regards to this research project.

I've completed it. I don't have an ASD diagnosis, but I do have an ADHD diagnosis.

Good luck with your thesis.

Jason

@ COMPAQ: I didn't think to add a comment textbox at the end of the survey, though it's a good idea. I'll include one in the future. It can be hard though to incorporate what people write in text into the analysis though, as most studies in psychology are run through statistical analyses, hence the use of all the questions where people respond on a scale. Would your use of "tuning down" also be described as "withdrawing" or "disengaging"? Some of the methods you describe (e.g., rational thought, thinking differently about a situation) were included in the survey, perhaps they were misinterpreted? Or not specific enough? There was a coping skills inventory included in the survey which I made based on a previous study where I interviewed adolescents and young adults with ASD and asked them what they did to help regulate their own emotions. From this I made the questionnaire in the hopes to actually measure quantitatively people's use of these strategies.

I'm also a little confused by what you mean when you say it breaks the causality in my questions. Could you explain for this for me as I would like to understand more. As for the typos, sorry about that. I had the study pilot tested on a small sample of participants to tell me if there were any typos/errors and there were some that were spotted and corrected, but perhaps some were missed. Also the English language used in this questionnaire was UK English and not US English, and so there may be the illusion of some typos if you are more familiar with US English spelling. As for the specific question "I often feel that I wouldn't care if I died", it refers to someone feeling if they wouldn't care if they died shortly after feeling that emotion. For example, someone may feel extremely down or horrible, and not care if a bus crashes and crushes them at that very moment. It's typically for the preliminary stages of suicidal ideation. As for the question "I usually don't plan ahead and will leave assignments or tasks to the last minute", do you mean you plan to leave tasks to the last minute? Or that you plan to not leave tasks to the last minute, but you don't follow your plans?

As for the typical fraud page, it's aimed to attract people's attention and keep them interested. I wanted to make the incentive clear in order to get people's attention so they don't quickly close the page when they see a boring page full of text. I think fraudsters unfortunately use the same method, as they too want your attention. It's a method that works; fortunately for me, unfortunately for fraudsters.

Thanks for taking the time to give me the feedback, and thanks for taking my survey I really appreciate it!

@ WerewoldPoet & Jtuk, Thanks to you also for taking my survey! It helps me a great deal! I'll be sure to post the results up on this thread when I'm finished. It would be good to get people's feedback on my interpretation too of the results.

Why do you not want responses from people over 30?

@Damiano:
Thanks for your reply. About the fraud impression: I wouldn't have taken the survey without having the means to somewhat validate the SSL certificate and geotrace the subdomain to confirm that it is valid. Fraud can be everywhere, for example I once saw an advertisement in a local newspaper, something like "I give away over 30 Nintendo Wii games for free because my children grew out of it" and it turned out that the person made a trip from the Ukraine all through Germany and back, putting those advertisements in local newspapers. He would then later be decently claiming shipping costs from the Ukraine for the games from all the people that called and never ship any game. You never exactly know in advance when the actual fraud will take place.

I wanted to point out, that 'thinking differently' wasn't how it works in me, except if compared to other people in general. Thinking differently would mean primarily e.g. thinking optimistic instead of pessimistic or neutral for the sake of feeling differently about it, or 'tricks' like thinking of the easy tasks before the difficult ones, although the difficult ones are more urgent.
I wouldn't describe the 'tuning down' as withdrawing or disengaging. I am familiar with neurological pain coping mechanisms in people with fibromyalgia which can possibly also lead to alexithymia. That's the most accurate description of what happens in me I know of (although not 100% similar .. can't find that study).

As for breaking causality: I don't remember the questions well anymore. But given that the mechanism described above is my primary means of dealing with intense emotional responses (which is not captured by the survey), your questions only target the little that's left, which is unimportant to me. E.g. I answered that music can make me feel better and that I listen to music frequently which makes me feel better, but that has absolutely no relevance to my emotional functioning whatsoever and I actually listen to music mostly because it very simply and physically suppresses environmental noise. The real cause of music helping or why I do it in the first place isn't that it causes some positive emotion, but that it improves insufficient physical circumstances. I also answered something like "focusing on my special interest can help me overcome troublesome emotions", because it can, but it doesn't have any relevance in dealing with troublesome emotions - none at all - and it isn't even used that way because it has other implications which are more difficult to handle. Just the fact that something can or does do something doesn't create an actual sufficient causal connection and doesn't show any relevance of that connection.
Comparison: Ask a farmer "Do you use mousetraps for pest control?" (A: definitely agree) "Can mousetraps generally help you to get rid of pests?" (A: definitely agree) "Can mousetraps help you when you have severe pest problems?" (A: definitely agree). Seeming conclusion: mousetraps are generally used by farmers for pest control and good against severe pest problems. Reality: poison accounted for 99% of the actual pest control (but poison wasn't in the questionnaire) and the farmer only used mousetraps in situations where poison was too dangerous, e.g. in the children's room, so that the children won't be scared by mice before they eventually died of poison anyway. Mousetraps had no real relevance whatsoever to pest control and are not even remotely effective on the scale of a farmer's entire property.
Similarly, most of the questions had this kind of 'broken causality', that is when you will interpret them later on it will show something entirely different from what was actually going on (at least with me).
As described, even the definition of 'troublesome emotions' is different in me. Anxiety is not troublesome to me, because I can entirely regulate it and it most often helps me concentrate and function better, despite being unpleasant and exhausting. Feeling all too well when I am supposed to do something (e.g. earning money for a living) is also actually 'troublesome' to me (because it can rob me of concentration and motivation, eventually leading to negative circumstances) but then it all depends on the specific situation and I doubt that you targeted those things by that questions and I answered according to common convention (e.g. anxiety, hatred, worry is troublesome, feeling good is positive, etc.). There is no correlation between feeling positive or negative emotions regarding my overall performance or mental health in me. Your questions were asked as if negative emotion was generally bad and positive generally positive and that the sheer ratio of those two would determine your overall emotional state. That is /entirely/ untrue in me and maybe somewhat untrue also in normal people.
Then again because I do so much emotional suppression/control, your questions regarding positive emotion mostly did target emotions caused by my sex drive, which I can't really control and as described is eventually negative, despite being directly positive. Positive doesn't refer to me being happy about achieving something or being happy about doing X or being happy about not having to worry or feeling good around people, etc, because I don't experience that. That's what I mean by 'the little that is left', or said differently the largely irrelevant portion of emotional regulation, being the target of your questions. I cannot imagine that those questions were meant to work this way.

I don't understand your question about suicide. Even if some people would feel that way if suicidal, the vast majority of people will/must nonetheless feel realistically about it, resulting in the exact same answer. You simply cannot care if you are dead, because only people who exist can care (or do anything for that matter). Otherwise again, referring to the process of dying, no one knows about the preferred method of suicide of the person. I would e.g. choose an opioid overdose, in which case I again wouldn't care at all, even if I didn't want to die. Maybe it is just the English language being ambiguous here. Did you rather mean "I often feel that it is not important to prevent myself from dying." or "I often feel that it isn't important if I died or not."

I simply make elaborate plans which account for myself doing tasks in the last minute, but which aim at not doing it that way. Because I can concentrate better under pressure, but too much pressure and irregularity is bad, I have to avoid but do it at the same time and respect that in my plans.