Open Society

There are a number of possible reasons for neurodivergent people experiencing emotions more intensely than others. Neurodivergent people often experience emotional lability, emotional impulsivity, and negative intent attribution.We’re kind of an intense bunch sometimes.But that’s okay, our intensity can be a positive thing too: Neurodivergents can be more creative and more passionate. That creativity and passion can drive us to take action where others may not, and our cognitive rigidity can give us a strong sense of morals. These features combined make us more susceptible to a variety of sensitivities, including justice sensitivity.For example, in 2015, researchers found that participants with ADHD reported significantly higher justice sensitivity and greater perceptions of injustice than those without ADHD.That same year, Schäfer & Kraneburg did an interesting study in search of a deeper understanding of why neurodivergents are prone to Justice Sensitivity, which is what I will discuss here.

Findings suggest that environmental sensitivity is a continuous and normally distributed trait but that people fall into three distinct sensitive groups along a sensitivity continuum.

In conclusion, besides providing evidence that the HSP scale reflects indeed a unitary dimension of environmental sensitivity, we identified three sensitivity groups in the general population rather than the two proposed by common theories on individual differences in environmental sensitivity. In addition to high-sensitive (i.e. orchids) and low-sensitive (i.e. dandelions) individuals, we also detected a group representing individuals with medium sensitivity (i.e. tulips). Orchids are characterised by higher neuroticism and lower extraversion while being more susceptible to positive mood induction. Dandelions are more extraverted and score lower on neuroticism but also have a lower positive emotional reactivity with tulips being situated between dandelions and orchids.

Evidence that adverse rearing environments exert negative effects particularly on children and adults presumed “vulnerable” for temperamental or genetic reasons may actually reflect something else: heightened susceptibility to the negative effects of risky environments and to the beneficial effects of supportive environments. Building on Belsky’s (1997, 2005; Belsky & Pluess, 2009) evolutionary-inspired differential susceptibility hypothesis stipulating that some individuals, including children, are more affected—both for better and for worse—by their environmental exposures and developmental experiences, recent research consistent with this claim is reviewed. It reveals that in many cases, including both observational field studies and experimental intervention ones, putatively vulnerable children and adults are especially susceptible to both positive and negative environmental effects. In addition to reviewing relevant evidence, unknowns in the differential-susceptibility equation are highlighted.

The first evidence which Belsky (1997, 2005; Belsky & Pluess, 2009) could point to consistent with his differential-susceptibility hypothesis concerned early negative emotionality. Children scoring high on this supposed “risk factor”, particularly in the early years, appeared to benefit disproportionately from supportive rearing environments (Boyce & Ellis, 2005; Ellis, Boyce, Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2011)

And Belsky (2005) speculates that negativity actually reflects a highly sensitive nervous system on which experience registers powerfully — negatively when not regulated by the caregiver but positively when coregulation occurs — a point of view somewhat related to Boyce and Ellis’ (2005) proposal that susceptibility may reflect prenatally programmed hyper-reactivity to stress.

In this evaluation, we identify a structural issue—low quality intervention research—that has significant implications for autistic youth transitioning from high school to adulthood. Unsatisfactory outcomes for recently graduated autistic adults could be, at least in part, because the services provided to support their transition to adulthood simply are not efficacious, and not because their disability status inherently leads to poor outcomes. Our findings may also explain negative perceptions of the services offered to transition autistic youth, from both autistic youth and parents. Autistic youth who recently graduated high school describe a lack of appropriate supports that meet their specific needs (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2020), and parents report optimism about school services when their children first enter the transition period, but find that school-based transition services do not meet their expectations over time (Kirby et al., 2020). For intervention research that uses the experimental methods we examine here, significant improvements will need to be made. These include reducing significant risks of bias, adequately assessing adverse events, and focusing on meaningful outcomes. These improvements are essential for ensuring professionals provide the support transition-age autistic students deserve.

The second structural issue, which is the focus of this review, is that there may be little high-quality research available to inform educators and other service providers regarding the types of support they should provide to transition-age autistic youth. Fewer funding dollars are spent, and fewer research reports are published, on interventions designed for transition-age autistic youth as compared to interventions designed for younger autistic children (Cervantes et al., 2021; Hume et al., 2021). This could be because researchers and funders consider early childhood to be a “critical period” when intervention services are most likely to be effective, despite a lack of evidence for this claim (Sandbank, Bottema-Beutel, & Woynaroski, 2021). In addition, previous syntheses that address research quality suggest autism intervention research in general lacks rigor (Davis et al., 2019; Gates et al., 2017; Sandbank et al., 2020), and this could also be true for research on transition-age autistic youth. Poor quality research exacerbates our ability to train school professionals and other providers to implement appropriate transition services because it is difficult to discern which services are worth implementing. In this study, we investigate this issue by evaluating all available research (including group and single-case designs (SCDs)) on interventions designed for transition-age autistic youth, which can inform services that focus on the transition to adulthood.