Connections between Emotion Regulation and Camouflaging

Abstract

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disability that impacts social and cognitive skills (Baksh et al., 2021). Historically assigned female at birth people are significantly under- and late-diagnosed as compared to their assigned male at birth counterparts (Loomes et al., 2017). Some researchers theorize that this discrepancy could be due to camouflaging, a phenomenon in which any autistic person masks their natural presentation of autistic symptoms (Attwood, 2007). However, more research is needed to fully understand this phenomenon. Emotion regulation (ER), which involves the management of one’s emotions via adaptive and maladaptive strategies, is another strategy prevalent in autism as well as non-autistic people. (Samson et al., 2015). Expressive suppression, an ER technique, “involves reducing emotion-expressive behavior once the individual is already in an emotional state” (John and Gross, 2004, pg.1302). This strategy of suppressing natural states is a common thread between camouflaging and ER. However, few studies to date have explored the link between the two. This study aimed to examine the link xi between ER and camouflaging. We examined emotion suppression as an independent conceptualization of ER and gathered autistic traits broadly in a general population sample. Gender was gathered on a continuous scale. Initial study results showed that emotion suppression and camouflaging are related. Specifically, we found that autistic traits, emotion suppression and gender did the best job of predicting camouflaging independently. Surprisingly autistic traits and gender did not have to interact in order to impact emotion suppression.