Relationship Between Social Motivation in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Parents.

Mirko Uljarević,Booil Jo,Matthew N Cooper,Antonio Y Hardan,Jennifer M Phillips,Thomas W Frazier,Wesley Billingham

doi:10.3389/fnins.2021.660330

Abstract

Impairment in social motivation (SM) has been suggested as a key mechanism underlying social communication deficits observed in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the factors accounting for variability in SM remain poorly described and understood. The current study aimed to characterize the relationship between parental and proband SM. Data from 2,759 children with ASD (Mage = 9.03 years, SDage = 3.57, 375 females) and their parents from the Simons Simplex Collection (SSC) project was included in this study. Parental and proband SM was assessed using previously identified item sets from the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS). Children who had parents with low SM scores (less impairments) showed significantly lower impairments in SM compared to children who had either one or both parents with elevated SM scores. No parent-of-origin effect was identified. No significant interactions were found involving proband sex or intellectual disability (ID) status (presence/absence of ID) with paternal or maternal SM. This study establishes that low SM in children with ASD may be driven, in part, by lower SM in one or both parents. Future investigations should utilize larger family pedigrees, including simplex and multiplex families, evaluate other measures of SM, and include other related, yet distinct constructs, such as social inhibition and anhedonia. This will help to gain finer-grained insights into the factors and mechanisms accounting for individual differences in sociability among typically developing children as well as those with, or at risk, for developing ASD.

Highlights

Social motivation (SM), or the drive to engage, affiliate, and interact with others, has been proposed as a crucial factor for human adaptation and survival throughout evolution (Boyd et al, 2011; Tomasello et al, 2012)
Elevated parental SM score was defined as the top 25th percentile of the score distribution for mothers and fathers, respectively, and the remaining distribution was used as the referent group
The current study aimed to examine the familiality of SM by exploring the link between parental and proband the social responsiveness scale (SRS-2) SM scores

Summary

Introduction

Social motivation (SM), or the drive to engage, affiliate, and interact with others, has been proposed as a crucial factor for human adaptation and survival throughout evolution (Boyd et al, 2011; Tomasello et al, 2012). Lack of orienting to, and preference for, visual and auditory social stimuli, have been found during early development (Dawson et al, 1998; Osterling et al, 2002; Klin et al, 2009; Falck-Ytter et al, 2013) and throughout later childhood and adolescence (Klin et al, 2002; Sasson et al, 2011; Chevallier et al, 2015; Wright et al, 2016) Both structural and functional neuroimaging studies have provided consistent evidence for atypicality in key brain regions within the reward processing circuitry (Scott-Van Zeeland et al, 2010; Delmonte et al, 2012; Herrington et al, 2017; Kohls et al, 2018), it is still unclear whether noted deficits are constrained to social rewards or extend across other reward types (Clements et al, 2018). Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions such as the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) (Rogers and Dawson, 2010) and Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) (Koegel et al, 1999) that focus, among other aspects, on SM as a treatment target, have been shown to be effective in improving a range of skills and domains and to result in the need for fewer services later in life (Cidev et al, 2017; Sandbank et al, 2020)

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