ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Autism
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1524088
This article is part of the Research TopicAnxiety in Autistic People: Moving the NeedleView all 3 articles
Multi-method Multi-informant Examination of Social Anxiety in Autistic, Socially Anxious, and Neurotypical Adolescents
Provisionally accepted
- 1Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development, Duke University, Durham, United States
- 2University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
- 3Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, United States
- 4North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
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Discrepancies between caregiver and youth report of social anxiety symptoms persist, yet measuring social anxiety symptoms, particularly among autistic youths is critical clinically to inform intervention planning and make correct diagnostic decisions. Accordingly, we sought to evaluate caregiver-adolescent agreement on measures of social anxiety across three diagnostic groups (1) autistic, socially-anxious adolescents (n=20), socially anxious, non-autistic adolescents (n=20), and neurotypical adolescents (n=20). Caregivers and adolescents completed the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule (ADIS), Social Anxiety module and caregivers completed a battery of questionnaires to measure adolescent behavioral functioning in terms of adaptive, externalizing, and autism-related behaviors. Compared to adolescents, caregivers generally indicated greater observed behavioral interference (e.g., avoiding preferred activities) on the ADIS due to social anxiety symptoms (F(1, 56) = 8.48, p < 0.01). Moreover, caregivers in the autistic group reported the highest level of behavioral interference, followed by the social anxiety group, and then the neurotypical group. Autistic adolescents and their caregivers had the poorest agreement for social anxiety symptoms compared to the other two groups. These results demonstrate the differential impact of autism on the perception of social anxiety symptoms for caregivers and autistic adolescents. These results have implications for measuring social anxiety symptoms in autistic adolescents for research and clinical purposes as well as for intervention planning in this population.
Keywords: parent-child agreement, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Internalizing Behavior, Externalizing Behavior Anxiety Severity × Adolescent Social Anxiety Severity
Received: 07 Nov 2024; Accepted: 29 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Coffman, Antezana, Brown, Brown and Richey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Marika Coffman, Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development, Duke University, Durham, United States
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