Common Threads, Age-related Differences, and Avenues for Future Research: Response to Heaton

We appreciate the letter by Professor Heaton and appreciate this opportunity to further discuss our findings within the context of the extant literature. We agree that there were oversights in the literature review and have sent an erratum, already published in JADD, including the two primary omissions Heaton described (Allen et al. 2013; Heaton et al. 2008). It was not our intent to suggest that our study supersedes previous research, but rather simply that our study adds additional findings to understand the processing and experience of music-evoked emotion in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), particularly in a child and adolescent sample. The main findings in our study were (1) generally intact emotion identification abilities in children and adolescents with ASD, with a significant age x group interaction for identifying scary music and (2) overall reduced skin conductance response (SCR) to music-evoked emotion in the ASD group as well as a main effect for age group (the child group showed more arousal than the adolescent group). …