Correlation and predictive ability of sensory characteristics and social interaction in children with autism spectrum disorder

Frontiers in Psychiatry

Psychiatry

Yong Zhou¹  Lijie Wu²  Xiaoxue Li²  Jinhe Zhai²  Wei Xia²  Jia Wang²  Lili Fan²  Xiaomin Wang²  Yutong Li²  Meiru Hou² 

[1] Heilongjiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Harbin, China;School of Public Health, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China;

关键词: autism;    sensory;    social;    core symptom;    SSP;    clinical scale;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1056051

 received in 2022-09-28, accepted in 2023-03-13,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIndividuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have different social characteristics and particular sensory processing patterns, and these sensory behaviors may affect their social functioning. The objective of our study is to investigate the sensory profiles of children with ASD and their association with social behavior. Specifically, we aim to identify the predictive role of sensory processing in social functioning.MethodsThe Short Sensory Profile (SSP) was utilized to analyze sensory differences between ASD children and their peers. The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) and other clinical scales were employed to assess the social functioning of children with ASD. Additionally, the predictive ability of sensory perception on social performance was discussed using random forest and support vector machine (SVM) models.ResultsThe SSP scores of ASD children were lower than those of the control group, and there was a significant negative correlation between SSP scores and clinical scale scores (P < 0.05). The random forest and SVM models, using all the features, showed higher sensitivity, while the random forest model with 7-feature factors had the highest specificity. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) for all the models was higher than 0.8.ConclusionAutistic children in our study have different patterns of sensory processing than their peers, which are significantly related to their patterns of social functioning. Sensory features can serve as a good predictor of social functioning in individuals with ASD.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Zhai, Li, Zhou, Fan, Xia, Wang, Li, Hou, Wang and Wu.