Hari Srinivasan

Autistic inertia describes difficulty initiating, sustaining, stopping, or shifting action and cognitive state despite conscious intention. Existing accounts, including executive dysfunction, monotropism, predictive processing, autistic burnout, and disability-oriented perspectives, capture important aspects of the phenomenon but remain fragmented. We propose the Hidden Friction Framework (HFF), which addresses how intention can remain intact while its translation into flexible action becomes disrupted. The HFF proposes that autistic inertia may emerge from interacting predictive, transition, sensory–motor, executive–cognitive, emotional, and environmental forms of friction. Rather than treating inertia solely as a problem of action initiation, the framework considers difficulty flexibly entering, sustaining, exiting, or shifting cognitive, sensory, emotional, and behavioral states. It also helps explain why inertia may vary across contexts and why similar behavioral outcomes may arise from different configurations of friction. The HFF integrates cognitive, embodied, environmental, and lived-experience perspectives and generates testable predictions about how different sources of friction may independently and cumulatively shape action and state transition in autism.Keywords: autistic inertia, autism, embodiment, epistemic injustice, neurodiversity, disability theory.

Climate adaptation and disaster governance are reshaping where and how we live. Disasters do not strike evenly: disabled people face higher mortality, prolonged displacement, and greater barriers to recovery, yet disability remains weakly embedded in climate adaptation research and planning instruments. This paper synthesizes cross-regional evidence, situates disability within human security and justice frameworks, and proposes a four-pillar model-Access, Agency, Innovation, and Recovery (AAIR)-for operationalizing disability inclusion across the disaster arc. We show how AAIR translates existing rights commitments into auditable governance practice through concrete indicators (e.g., accessible early warning systems, voting representation for disabled people's organizations, adoption of community-originated solutions at scale, and time-bound device replacement and school re-entry benchmarks). The aim is practical: a governance-ready model tight enough to evaluate, comparable across planning instruments, and adaptable across development contexts. By specifying measurable indicators aligned with planning and financing architectures, AAIR functions as a policy instrument rather than a normative add-on.

Autistic adults frequently report that sensory load, communication constraints, unclear pacing, and unannounced proximity or touch shape whether physical-health research procedures are accessible. Yet physical-health research rarely reports these contextual conditions, limiting interpretability and obscuring who was able to participate. Existing reporting guidelines (e.g., Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials [CONSORT], Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology [STROBE], Template for Intervention Description and Replication, Standard Protocol Items: Recommendations for Interventional Trials, and Guidance for Reporting Involvement of Patients and the Public 2) improve transparency around study design and outcomes but do not prompt reporting of access-relevant context for autistic participants. Without this information, researchers cannot determine whether outcomes reflect the procedure itself, the conditions under which participation occurred, or whether findings generalize across autistic adults with differing support needs. This article introduces Transparent Reporting of Autistic Context and Environment (TRACE), a minimum reporting standard for physical-health research involving autistic adults. TRACE is intended primarily as a reporting guideline for disseminating research findings, analogous to established frameworks such as CONSORT and STROBE, with the goal of improving transparency in articles and supplementary materials. TRACE synthesizes evidence from autistic health research, participatory toolkits, and related mechanistic literatures to identify contextual factors that influence participation. The framework specifies nine reporting domains, including sensory context, communication access, pacing and predictability, proximity and touch practices, and access modifications. TRACE also includes a reporting checklist, an ultrabrief methods template, and expanded guidance for specialty contexts. As a practical add-on to existing reporting standards, TRACE makes access-relevant context visible, supporting clearer interpretation, comparability across studies, and more inclusive physical-health research.

Students are often told some version of the same story: If you work hard and keep the right mindset, you can do anything. In many classrooms, that message travels under the banner of growth mindset...

Loneliness is widely reported among autistic adults and is associated with adverse mental health outcomes. However, loneliness in autism is often framed as a consequence of social isolation, reduced social motivation, or individual social difficulty. This article argues that these framings—while consistent with general loneliness models—overlook a central feature of autistic loneliness: it frequently occurs amid ongoing social participation. Drawing on belonging theory, neurodiversity scholarship, epistemic justice, minority stress, and broader loneliness frameworks, this conceptual analysis introduces the Presence Without Belonging (PWB) framework. PWB distinguishes social presence from belonging and identifies three conditions required for belonging: recognition (being understood and taken seriously as a social subject), access (participation without extraordinary communicative, sensory, or temporal effort), and sustainability (participation that can be maintained over time without disproportionate cumulative cost). When one or more conditions are absent, participation may persist without belonging, producing loneliness despite contact. By reframing loneliness as a relational and structural outcome rather than an individual deficit, this analysis provides a foundation for more precise measurement, more accurate clinical formulation, and more responsible approaches to inclusion.

Emotion dysregulation is a common issue across childhood and adolescence, including in autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Yet most accounts remain descriptive—focusing on irritability, rapid escalation, slow return to baseline—without specifying the computational processes that stabilize emotions in context. We propose a predictive-coding account in which emotion regulation depends on how the brain predicts bodily and environmental signals, detects mismatches, between expectation and sensation, and determines how much confidence to assign those mismatches. Within this framework, dysregulation can arise when prediction errors are assigned excessive precision (i.e., incoming signals are overweighted relative to prior expectations, making them feel “too loud”), amplifying emotional reactivity or when prior expectations update too slowly (feelings get “stuck”), prolonging emotional states beyond contextual demands. We hypothesize that autism may involve heightened confidence assigned to surprising inputs together with sluggish updating of expectations, a combination that can produce both reactivity and emotional inertia. ADHD, by contrast, may be characterized by weaker expectations and unstable gain control, meaning the system’s amplification of incoming signals fluctuates from moment to moment, contributing to rapid, reactive swings in affect. We outline candidate physiological correlates—including heart-rate variability dynamics, pupillary variability, mismatch negativity, and neural indices of interoceptive precision—that could evaluate these hypotheses. Framing intervention around restoring flexible inference rather than suppressing emotion offers a mechanistic direction for developmental research. These predictions await empirical validation in developmental samples.

Heat is not just another climate stressor—it is among the most severe, and its health burdens are rising rapidly (Sultana, 2022). As the planet warms, heatwaves are becoming hotter, longer and more...

Emotional differences in autism are often interpreted as evidence of diminished emotional capacity. Yet contemporary emotion science views emotions as multicomponent processes organized across perceptual, cognitive, embodied, and meaning-making systems. Here we examine awe—a complex positive emotion involving shifts in attention, self-concept, and meaning making. Little is known about how awe is experienced in autism. We examined awe in autistic and neurotypical adults across three levels of analysis: experiential components, dispositional positive emotion, and narrative expression. Groups did not differ in dispositional awe. Instead, differences were selective and structural. Autistic adults differed in altered time perception and physiological aspects of awe, and in narratives describing interpersonal and abstract sources of awe. Differences persisted after controlling for socioeconomic status, personality traits, positive affect, and narrative verbosity. The findings suggest that awe in autism is preserved but differently organized, positioning autism as a revealing case for understanding the organization of emotional experience.

Background: Structural ableism, defined as the processes, policies, and institutions that privilege able-bodied people over disabled people, is a root cause of health inequalities faced by the disability community. Unlike other forms of structural oppression, there are currently no adequate measurements for structural ableism and its impacts. Therefore, a necessary first step to addressing health inequities that impact the disability community is to create validated measures of structural ableism. Objective: This paper outlines the methods of an ongoing project that aims to develop and validate measures of structural ableism. The resulting measures will facilitate the identification of relationships between structural ableism and health outcomes at both an individual and community level. Methods: This project will take place across 3 phases. In Phase I, we will characterize the multiple factors that comprise the construct of structural ableism. We will begin by analyzing texts that discuss historical events, ideologies, and the lived experiences of disabled people to inform our understanding of contemporary dimensions of structural ableism. Simultaneously, key informant interviews with advocates and activists from the disability rights and disability justice movements will be conducted to further characterize the dimensions of structural ableism. In Phase II, the findings of Phase I will be used to inform the creation of an individual-level measure of structural ableism. Phase III will result in community-level measures of structural ableism, which will be developed using community-engagement studios with members of the disability community and publicly available datasets. This phase will build on the findings of the first 2 phases. Our methods purposefully include disabled people across all phases of this work, with a focus on maximizing the diversity of disability perspectives by including people across disability types and intersecting identities (eg, race and ethnicity, gender identity, geographic location, and other identities and demographics). Most importantly, our approach is deeply community-informed, drawing on multiple community partnerships from local and national organizations, a diverse advisory committee of disabled activists, advocates, and scholars, as well as researchers with expertise in developing measures of structural oppression, such as structural racism. Results: This project was funded in August of 2024. As of October 2025, our team has read more than 50 texts as part of our historical and policy analysis of the factors that characterize structural ableism. We plan to complete our characterization of structural ableism in the spring of 2026, with individual-level measures of structural ableism being developed by the Winter of 2028 and community-level measures created by the Winter of 2029. Conclusions: The measures developed by this work will lay the foundation for identifying and evaluating novel interventions aimed at dismantling structural ableism, which should be cocreated with the disability community. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/86976