Cross-sectional study reveals emotion regulation difficulties mediate posttraumatic stress in autistic adults, indicating that emotional clarity is key for trauma resilience.
Key Points
To examine whether emotion regulation difficulties mediate the association between autism and posttraumatic stress symptoms following life-threatening and social triggers.
Assessed 68 autistic and 101 nonautistic adults using the PCL-5 for both life-threatening and social trauma triggers.
Measured emotion regulation challenges using the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) alongside sociodemographic data.
Conducted mediation analyses to assess whether overall emotion regulation deficits and specific subscales account for posttraumatic stress severity.
Autistic adults experienced significantly higher posttraumatic stress symptoms following both life-threatening and social triggers, alongside elevated emotion regulation difficulties relative to nonautistic controls.
Emotion regulation difficulties fully mediated the association between autism and posttraumatic stress symptoms for both trauma types, with lack of emotional clarity emerging as a distinct, significant mediator.