Feasibility of measuring social and nonsocial reward responsivity in autistic adolescents: An EEG study

Autistic youth are a prevalent population in the U.S. (1 in 36 youth diagnosed annually) that face greater risks for depression and anxiety than their non-autistic peers; however, autistic youth have been systemically excluded from most neuroscience and mental health research. Altered reward processing is a robust risk for depression in non-autistic youth that remains understudied in autistic youth even though in autism, depression is highly prevalent, reward differences are documented, and social difficulties are diagnostic features. In the present study, we demonstrate how we successfully adapted an EEG protocol to examine the feasibility, acceptability, and utility of two EEG paradigms to measure social and nonsocial reward positivity (RewP) in 60 autistic adolescents (14-17 years old; 31.7% female sex) as a first step towards examining altered reward responsivity as a risk factor for depression in this population. Findings suggest that these EEG paradigms are feasible to collect high quality data in this population, acceptable to most autistic adolescents, and reliable in measuring the expected RewP waveform. A significant difference emerged in RewP to monetary win and loss, but not for social acceptance and rejection suggesting that social motivation may be blunted in this population and/or that alternative methods (e.g., time-frequency analyses) may be necessary to more fully understand reward responsivity in this population.