Concurrent predictors of behavioral inflexibility in minimally verbal and verbal autistic children

Abstract

Behavioral inflexibility (BI) refers to the rigid and inflexible patterns of behaviors that are a core aspect of autism. Few studies have investigated BI in autism separately from other restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs). The present study used a relatively new measure, the behavioral inflexibility scale (BIS; Lecavalier, L., Bodfish, J., Harrop, C., Whitten, A., Jones, D., Pritchett, J., Faldowski, R., & Boyd, B. (2020). Autism Research, 13(3), 489–499), to examine the relationship of BI and variables that are both core symptoms in autism as well as symptoms associated with cooccurring mental health conditions, atypical sensory experiences, and adaptive functioning in a sample of 87 children with autism. Additionally, we aimed to understand how these relationships may be related to autistic individuals' verbal status: minimally verbal (MV) or verbal. Results revealed that anxiety, attention deficit/hyperactive, depressive, oppositional defiance problems, and sensory differences were all significantly correlated with BI in the MV group. In contrast, only anxiety, depressive, and oppositional defiance problems were significantly correlated with BI in the verbal group. Linear regression analyses showed that oppositional defiance problems and atypical sensory experiences explained a significant proportion of the variance of BI in the MV group, whereas only depressive problems were significant in the verbal group after accounting for other mental health conditions. Overall, our findings demonstrate that multiple aspects of psychopathology are significantly related to BI and can have broader implications for interventions and mental health care in autistic children.