Developing Inner Speech to Help Autistic Individuals Improve Their Self‐Regulation Ability: A Pilot Randomized‐Controlled Trial

Some autistic children often have difficulty regulating their emotions. This pilot study evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention to reduce emotional dysregulation by developing inner speech in autistic children. The therapy is called Thinking in Speech (TiS). Nine certified speech-language pathologists were trained remotely. They, in turn, remotely administered TiS to 22 autistic children. Participating children were randomly assigned to either a therapy immediate or a waitlist control condition. Both groups received sixteen 30-min therapy sessions over 8-10 weeks. Parents rated the amount of emotional dysregulation on three measures before the intervention and after the sixteen 30-min therapy sessions. Results showed significant results on the Emotion Dysregulation Inventory-Dysphoria Scale (F = 5.49, n = 11, p = 0.008), and marginally significant results on the Emotion Dysregulation Inventory Index Regulation Index-Reactivity Scale (F = 2.57, n = 11, p = 0.089). Such findings suggest a potential impact of developing inner speech to reduce emotion dysregulation in autistic children.