Examining the Impact of a Brief Compassion Focused Intervention on Everyday Experiences of Compassion in Autistic Adults Through Psychophysiology and Experience Sampling

Abstract

Autistic adults experience greater rates of anxiety and depression compared to the general population. Compassion-focused therapy interventions, aimed at promoting self-compassion capabilities, have shown efficacy in improving mental health outcomes in autistic and non-autistic samples suffering from self-criticism that contribute to difficulties in emotion regulation. We explored the experiences of autistic adults during a brief one-week online self-compassion exercise to evaluate it’s feasibility and acceptability through self-report, experience sampling, and parasympathetic activity measured via HRV. Pre- to post-intervention comparisons showed significant improvement in trait self-compassion and fears of self-compassion, but this did not extend to acute measures of psychological distress (depression, anxiety, and stress) nor difficulties in emotion regulation. HRV measures displayed significant increases during self-compassionate practice, although there were no significant changes in physiological reactivity pre- to post-intervention. Experience sampling measures found that whether participants acted on opportunities to be self-compassionate was predictive of concurrent evaluations of affective system activation, whereby acting self-compassionately was associated with greater reported activation of the soothing affective system. Together, our findings support the use of multimodal approaches to investigating the accessibility and efficacy of compassion-focused approaches to resolving emotional difficulties experienced by autistic adults.