Emotional and behavioral dysregulation are the primary characteristics youth with autism present in clinical settings and are highly predictive of caregiver stress. But the mechanisms that underlie these phenomena are not well understood. These challenges are compounded for youth who are minimally verbal or have an intellectual disability. 

In this lecture, Matthew Siegel will draw upon a new resource, the Autism Inpatient Collection data set, to offer preliminary insights into the relationships between physiologic arousal, emotion dysregulation and the occurrence of challenging behaviors. Such behaviors may represent an attempt to modulate physiologic arousal in minimally verbal individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Siegel will present pilot data, using machine learning approaches, that identifies physiologic arousal as a biomarker of distress in ASD and that illustrates an opportunity to predict the onset of challenging behavior in real time. This work seeks to address the critical, parent-identified issue of uncertainty regarding when a challenging behavior may occur and may open new avenues for intervention.

Siegel is an associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine, the vice president for medical affairs, developmental disorders service at Maine Behavioral Healthcare, and a faculty scientist at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute.  He attended Amherst College, Stanford Medical School and trained at Brown University in child psychiatry, psychiatry, and pediatrics. Siegel is the principal investigator of the Autism Inpatient Collection and is an expert in the inpatient treatment of challenging behaviors in individuals with autism and other developmental disorders.