Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry: Efficacy of the Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement (EASE) Program in Autism: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Emotion dysregulation, characterized by an individual’s challenges in monitoring and modifying emotional reactivity, is more likely to occur among autistic people than among non-autistic people. Emotion dysregulation is associated with multiple forms of mental health difficulties such as depression, anxiety, and aggression in autism. In addition, emotion dysregulation in autism has been associated with the need for interventions including psychotropic medications, emergency room visits for mental health needs, and hospitalizations.
A group of scientists led by Carla Mazefsky, PhD (Nancy J. Minshew, MD Chair in Autism Research and Professor of Psychiatry, Clinical and Translational Science, and Psychology), developed the Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement (EASE) Program, an individual therapy program developed to improve emotion dysregulation in autistic adolescents and young adults. They tested its efficacy in improving emotion dysregulation in autistic adolescents and young adults, compared to a rigorous active control condition.
Results of the multisite randomized controlled trial were published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, with Susan White, PhD (Department of Psychology, University of Alabama), as first author; Dr. Mazefsky as senior author; and including Caitlin Conner, PhD (Research Associate Professor of Psychiatry); and Kelly Beck, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry). They found that EASE resulted in greater declines in emotion dysregulation at post-treatment than the comparison therapy. Participants who completed EASE were 1.5 times more likely to have less impairment in daily life because of dysregulation than the comparison group, though this difference was not statistically significant. Participants in EASE showed improvement in both internalizing and externalizing symptoms, whereas only externalizing symptoms improved in comparison participants.
“Emotion dysregulation can have such a negative snowball effect on social, school, employment, and mental health outcomes in autism. So, we were really encouraged to find that EASE led to significant improvements in emotion dysregulation and now can be considered an evidence-based option for therapy,” said Dr. Mazefsky.
Efficacy of the Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement (EASE) Program in Autism: A Randomized Controlled Trial
White SW, Conner CM, Beck K, Mazefsky CA.
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2025, ISSN 0890-8567, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2025.07.1058.