An Online Healthy Relationships Class for Autistic Adults (HEARTS): A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Many autistic adults are interested in having more and better-quality friendships and dating relationships, but there are too few evidence-based interventions that support building healthier peer relationships. Healthy Relationships on the Autism Spectrum (HEARTS) is a six-session, online class codeveloped with autistic people and co-delivered by teams that include at least one autistic expert who operates from the core idea that autistic people can be their authentic selves and can create and maintain healthy, supportive, mutual intimate partnership and friendship relationships. Methods: This preregistered randomized controlled trial study investigated the effects of HEARTS for autistic individuals aged 18 years old and older. Autistic individuals ( N = 92) were randomly assigned to either HEARTS or an active control condition (ACC). The purpose of this study was to find out if the HEARTS class had an impact on participants’ self-directed relationship satisfaction goals, social motivation, experiences with aggressive acts in dating relationships, attitudes toward rejection, or hostile automatic thoughts 6 weeks after the HEARTS class ended. Results: Compared with the ACC group, participants in HEARTS showed statistically significant improvement in relationship satisfaction. There were no improvements in experiences with aggressive acts in dating relationships, social motivation, hostile automatic thoughts, or rejection sensitivity. Conclusions: HEARTS is feasible to implement and was generally well-received by the community as well as effective for improving relationship satisfaction.