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Empathy and Cognition in High-Functioning Children With Autism
Abstract
This study compares the ability of nonretarded autistic children (9-16 years of age) with the ability of normally developing children (9-14 years of age) to discriminate between various emotional states, to take the perspective of another regarding emotional states, and to respond affectively. The children's understanding of conservation was also assessed. While the children with autism did surprisingly well on the empathy-related measures, they performed less well than the normal children on these measures and on conservation. There was a closer association between cognitive abilities and affective understanding in the group of autistic children than in the control group.
... Dentro del área socio-emocional podemos hablar la expresión, la percepción, la comprensión y la respuesta ante emociones simples y complejas. Hay un número significativo de estudios que defienden la existencia de un déficit en personas con autismo en el reconocimiento y comprensión de emociones, después de compararlos con grupos control ( Baron-Cohen, Hobson, 1986aHobson, , 1986bOzonoff, Pennington & Rogers, 1990;Rump et al., 2009;Yirmiya, Sigman, Kasari, & Mundy, 1992). Algunos estudios delimitan el déficit en el reconocimiento de emociones concretas como el miedo (De Jong, van Engelund & Kemner, 2008;Pelphrey et al., 2002), la tristeza (Boraston et al., 2007) o emociones -negativas‖ (Ashwin et al., 2006;Humphreys et al., 2007), mostrando en líneas generales menos atención a emociones negativas (Sigman, Kasari, Kwon & Yirmiya, 1992). ...
... -Cohen, 1993;Frith, 1989;Hobson, Ouston & Lee, 1989). Este déficit se manifiesta tanto con estímulos estáticos (Celani, Battacchi & Arcidiacono, 1999;Deruelle et al., 2004;Macdonald et al., 1989), como dinámicos (Evers et al., 2011;Hobson, 1986aHobson, , 1986bYirmiya et al., 1992). ...
... En resumen, se puede decir que las capacidades cognitivas ayudan a la comprensión emocional en el caso del autismo. Las correlaciones significativas entre test de inteligencia y competencia emocional encontradas en personas con TEA apoyan esta idea (Bölte & Poustka, 2003;Davies et al., 1994;Happé, 1995;Kamio et al., 2006;Pelphrey et al., 2005b;Yirmiya et al., 1992). Aunque son necesarios muchos más estudios en el futuro que tengan como objetivo principal descubrir la naturaleza de esta relación. ...
Based on the distinction between "hot" and "cool" executive functions
(Zelazo & Müller, 2002), a research line that aims to study the relationship
between executive functions related to emotions (―hot") and socio-emotional
deficits observed in ASD, began. The main objective of this study is to analyze
the psychopathological correlates of emotional deficits in ASD.
This work arises in this theoretical framework and aims to study socioemotional
deficits in adults with autism, in relation to both "hot" and ―cool‖
executive dysfunctions, social maturity, autistic traits and comorbid
psychopathology, specifying which variables influence or explain the perception
of emotions in Autism Spectrum Disorders. Four experiments were designed,
linked to the 4 general objectives of the research:
1. Confirm the presence of emotional perception deficits in adults with ASD, compared to the control group (no TEA).
2. Confirm the presence of deficits in executive functions attributed to the ASD group, compared to the control group (no TEA).
3. Specify which variables influence, or explain, the perception of emotions in adults with autism, in order to find out the nature of emotional deficits in people with autism.
4. Establish if certain emotional permeability exists in the experimental group (TEA), through a task of emotion induction.
... The following interventions attempt to teach autistic children theory of mind (Yirmiya et aL, (1992) Ozonoff and Miller, (1995). Ozonoff and Miller taught false belief tasks in a research unit to nine verbal autistic boys with IQs of 70 and above, described as high-functioning autistics. ...
... It seems likely that the lack of generalisation indicates the learning of rules rather than conceptualisation. Yirmiya et aL (1992) tested 18 high-functioning autistic children aged 9-16 and 14 normal controls for empathy and conservation ability in a research unit. The hypothesis was that autistic children who did not have severe learning difficulties would perform less well on three measures of empathy: discriminating among affective states, assuming the perspective and role of another and an emotional response. ...
... These are abstract tasks with logico-representational difficulty, which pitch straight into the area of greatest difficulty for these students. Those who did better on these abstract tasks tended to have better language levels but this needs further analysis (see Yirmiya et aL, 1992). Some of their teaching materials are very detailed and leveled to the abilities of the child but they are not social interventions as such but make excellent screening instruments. ...
The aim of this study was to try and establish whether achievement level (low, average or high), gender, SEN stage and EAL level influenced teachers' attributions of, and strategy use with, junior age pupils in the inner city primary school. Teachers' beliefs about the causes of pupils' academic success and failure were investigated within three research traditions: attribution research, research using Personal Construct methodology and research into teachers' self-efficacy beliefs. The pilot study involved a construct and strategy elicitation exercise from which a questionnaire was designed to enable teachers to rate children on bipolar attributions and rate the frequency of their strategy use. Five research questions were explored. The first connected previous research to this study and investigated how much of the variance in attribution scores could be explained by ability and effort factors. 60% of the variance could be explained by these factors and within this figure, 37.7% by ability and 22.8% by effort. This supports previous research in this area. Further research questions explored the effects of the independent variables on teachers' attributions and their strategy use. Low achievers, boys and students at school action plus had consistent and significant ratings at the negative end of the majority of the bipolar attributions. A factor analysis of strategy use threw up the three factors of ability, immediate effort, and motivation or typical effort strategies. A multivariate analysis of variance distinguished significantly between achievement levels and on all three factors, between genders on immediate effort strategies, between the stages of SEN on ability and immediate effort strategies, and between EAL stages on ability strategies. It was concluded that this questionnaire, with modifications, could be a very useful tool for the educational psychologist assessing teachers' attributions of and strategy use with individual children.
... In a different study, while all participants attended to the hurt individual, children with ID showed heart-rate deceleration in response to an adult's high levels of distress, but this was not the case in the ASD group, suggesting that this group was neither aroused by the distressed individual nor overtly intending to avoid them . Other studies have also shown reduced responses to others' facial affect in ASD Loveland & Tunali, 1991;Yirmiya, Sigman, Kasari, & Mundy, 1992), a behaviour which is stable and at pre-school can predict the responsiveness of the same group 5 years later (Dissanayake, Sigman, & Kasari, 1996). Importantly, the level of responsiveness is associated with the level of functioning of the individuals with ASD. ...
... However, they do not show anticipatory concern(J. A. or heart rate changes and they generally demonstrate reduced empathic/affiliative behavioural responses to others' signals of distress Loveland & Tunali, 1991;Yirmiya et al., 1992). Our paradigm is different from previous ones in that it recreates a realistic interactive environment, which provides action possibilities in the absence of explicit social demands. ...
... The literature investigating the responses of individuals with ASD to other people's emotional signals is limited. To our knowledge only 10 studies have addressed this question Celani et al., 1999;Dissanayake et al., 1996;Klapwijk et al., 2017;Loveland & Tunali, 1991;Sigman et al., 1992;Yirmiya et al., 1992). To do so they focused on video recorded responses of ASD children during social situations where the participants' parent or one of the experimenters would show strong fear, discomfort or distress in response to something unfortunate that happened to them during the interaction. ...
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are neurodevelopmental conditions characterised by persistent deficits in social reciprocity. Deficits in emotion perception are common in ASD and suggested to stem from a generalised deficit in the processing of facial affect. The literature however is inconsistent, stressing the importance of methodological factors that might bring individuals with ASD to a disadvantage. Two relevant theoretical frameworks are considered: 1) the behavioural self-regulation account proposes that affective atypicalities stem from deficits in the processing of the emotional signals and/or the regulation of appropriate responses to these signals; and 2) the social motivation account proposes that the mechanisms behind either of these two stages of emotion understanding are intact and that behavioural deficits stem from reduced weighting of social information. This Ph.D. aimed to disentangle between the two theories in the context of social threats by taking into account the necessary methodological factors. Experiment 1 investigated the contextual impact of gaze direction on the categorisation of facial expressions of anger and fear. Experiment 2 investigated both free action choice in response to implicit social threats –facial expressions of anger and fear- and their emotion categorisation accuracy in visual periphery. Across both studies ASD and typically developing (TD) adolescents demonstrated intact processing of both anger and fear in direct view and in visual periphery and were sensitive to the changes in emotional intensity of the stimuli. In Experiment 1, although the control group was overall more accurate than the ASD group in emotion decoding, gaze direction impacted the processing of threat similarly in both groups. Specifically, gaze direction raised the saliency of the threat for the observer and enhanced their sensitivity to the most salient ones. In Experiment 2, both groups demonstrated an overall tendency to avoid emotional agents, which was particularly evident in the case of anger. Taken together, the mechanisms behind the processing of facial social threats appear relatively spared in ASD adolescents and the impact of contextual factors are similar ASD and typical development. Adolescents with ASD are able to use social threats to adapt their behaviour by avoiding the emotional agent, which is not surprising during a developmental period characterised by enhanced reactivity to threat. These findings are discussed in terms of the social motivation and behavioural self-regulation frameworks and future directions are proposed.
... Authors defined a true empathic response to be when the participant felt the same emotion that he or she perceived the character to be feeling, regardless of whether that perception correctly matched the intended emotion of the test. 20 Yirmiya et al found that participants with autism had poorer affect recognition and fewer empathic responses than controls. Moreover, they found a strong correlation between affect recognition and empathy (rZ.68, ...
... P<.01). 20 The aims of the current study were to examine empathic responses to affective film clips in participants with and without TBI; and to determine the association of empathic responses and affect recognition using a similar method to Yirmiya et al. 20 Results of the current study should provide a clearer and more accurate understanding of the affect recognition-empathy relationship in the TBI population. Previous studies have indicated that people with TBI have low empathy and blunted emotional responses to affective stimuli, 8,22,23 thus it was hypothesized that they would be less likely to report a shared emotional response with characters in film clips than controls. ...
... P<.01). 20 The aims of the current study were to examine empathic responses to affective film clips in participants with and without TBI; and to determine the association of empathic responses and affect recognition using a similar method to Yirmiya et al. 20 Results of the current study should provide a clearer and more accurate understanding of the affect recognition-empathy relationship in the TBI population. Previous studies have indicated that people with TBI have low empathy and blunted emotional responses to affective stimuli, 8,22,23 thus it was hypothesized that they would be less likely to report a shared emotional response with characters in film clips than controls. ...
... Authors defined a true empathic response to be when the participant felt the same emotion that he or she perceived the character to be feeling, regardless of whether that perception correctly matched the intended emotion of the test. 20 Yirmiya et al found that participants with autism had poorer affect recognition and fewer empathic responses than controls. Moreover, they found a strong correlation between affect recognition and empathy (rZ.68, ...
... P<.01). 20 The aims of the current study were to examine empathic responses to affective film clips in participants with and without TBI; and to determine the association of empathic responses and affect recognition using a similar method to Yirmiya et al. 20 Results of the current study should provide a clearer and more accurate understanding of the affect recognition-empathy relationship in the TBI population. Previous studies have indicated that people with TBI have low empathy and blunted emotional responses to affective stimuli, 8,22,23 thus it was hypothesized that they would be less likely to report a shared emotional response with characters in film clips than controls. ...
... P<.01). 20 The aims of the current study were to examine empathic responses to affective film clips in participants with and without TBI; and to determine the association of empathic responses and affect recognition using a similar method to Yirmiya et al. 20 Results of the current study should provide a clearer and more accurate understanding of the affect recognition-empathy relationship in the TBI population. Previous studies have indicated that people with TBI have low empathy and blunted emotional responses to affective stimuli, 8,22,23 thus it was hypothesized that they would be less likely to report a shared emotional response with characters in film clips than controls. ...
Objective:
To compare empathic responses to affective film clips in participants with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and Healthy controls (HCs), and examine associations with affect recognition.
Design:
Cross sectional study using a quasi-experimental design.
Setting:
Multi-site study conducted at a post-acute rehabilitation facility in the USA and a University in Canada.
Participants:
A convenience sample of 60 adults with moderate to severe TBI and 60 HCs, frequency matched for age and sex. Average time post-injury was 14 years (range: .5-37) MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Participants were shown affective film clips and asked to report how the main character in the clip felt and how they personally felt in response to the clip. Empathic responses were operationalized as participants feeling the same emotion they identified the character to be feeling.
Results:
Participants with TBI had lower emotion recognition scores (p=.007) and fewer empathic responses than HCs (67% vs. 79%; p<.001). Participants with TBI accurately identified and empathically responded to characters' emotions less frequently (65%) than HCs (78%). Participants with TBI had poorer recognition scores and fewer empathic responses to sad and fearful clips compared to HCs. Affect recognition was associated with empathic responses in both groups (p<.001). When participants with TBI accurately recognized characters' emotions, they had an empathic response 71% of the time, which was more than double their empathic responses for incorrectly identified emotions.
Conclusions:
Participants with TBI were less likely to recognize and respond empathically to others' expressions of sadness and fear, which has implications for interpersonal interactions and relationships. This is the first study in the TBI population to demonstrate a direct association between an affect stimulus and an empathic response.
... Several studies have demonstrated a relationship between affect recognition and affective empathy in nonclinical populations 43,44 and in children with autism. 45 For instance, affective labeling and empathic responses (ie, feeling the same emotion as a character in a vignette) were found to be significantly correlated (r = 0.68) in children with high-functioning autism, indicating that poorer emotion recognition was associated with decreased affective empathy. 45 Surprisingly, cognitive empathy was not found to be associated with emotion recognition. ...
... 45 For instance, affective labeling and empathic responses (ie, feeling the same emotion as a character in a vignette) were found to be significantly correlated (r = 0.68) in children with high-functioning autism, indicating that poorer emotion recognition was associated with decreased affective empathy. 45 Surprisingly, cognitive empathy was not found to be associated with emotion recognition. 44 Together, these findings suggest that affect recognition may have a stronger association with affective rather than cognitive empathy, emphasizing the importance of simulating and sharing another person's emotional state. ...
... Again, these findings should attempt to be replicated with larger studies, not only because affect recognition has been theoretically thought to be a fundamental precursor for empathy 14,41 but also because associations between affect recognition and affective empathy have been found in studies with autistic individuals and nonclinical samples. [43][44][45] It is possible that our results differed from Lawrence et al 43 and Yirmiya et al 45 because we used a different affective empathy measure. Although we used the same affective measure of empathy as Riggio et al, 44 our results may have differed from theirs because they used a wider range of facial expressions (ie, disgust, surprise and neutral), potentially making the task more difficult and sensitive to affective empathy. ...
... Several studies have demonstrated a relationship between affect recognition and affective empathy in nonclinical populations 43,44 and in children with autism. 45 For instance, affective labeling and empathic responses (ie, feeling the same emotion as a character in a vignette) were found to be significantly correlated (r = 0.68) in children with high-functioning autism, indicating that poorer emotion recognition was associated with decreased affective empathy. 45 Surprisingly, cognitive empathy was not found to be associated with emotion recognition. ...
... 45 For instance, affective labeling and empathic responses (ie, feeling the same emotion as a character in a vignette) were found to be significantly correlated (r = 0.68) in children with high-functioning autism, indicating that poorer emotion recognition was associated with decreased affective empathy. 45 Surprisingly, cognitive empathy was not found to be associated with emotion recognition. 44 Together, these findings suggest that affect recognition may have a stronger association with affective rather than cognitive empathy, emphasizing the importance of simulating and sharing another person's emotional state. ...
... Again, these findings should attempt to be replicated with larger studies, not only because affect recognition has been theoretically thought to be a fundamental precursor for empathy 14,41 but also because associations between affect recognition and affective empathy have been found in studies with autistic individuals and nonclinical samples. [43][44][45] It is possible that our results differed from Lawrence et al 43 and Yirmiya et al 45 because we used a different affective empathy measure. Although we used the same affective measure of empathy as Riggio et al, 44 our results may have differed from theirs because they used a wider range of facial expressions (ie, disgust, surprise and neutral), potentially making the task more difficult and sensitive to affective empathy. ...
... However, they provided instances of situations that were more general and less personal than these children (Kasari, Paparella, & Bauminger, 1999). Yirimiya, Sigman, Kasari & Mundy, (1992) and Kasari, Chamberlain and Bauminger (2000), found that children with autism had more difficulty providing an example of guilt than typically developing children, even though they reported experiencing guilt as frequently as typically developing children. ...
... Chapter 1 reported studies exploring empathy in children with autism. These studies focused on responses to discomfort in others (Sigman, Kasari, Kwon & Yirmiya, 1992) and in high functioning school age children, these studies focused on how a main character felt after viewing scenes designed to elicit empathie responses (Yirmiya, Sigman, Kasari & Mundy, 1992). ...
The topic of this thesis is the recognition and expression of pride, guilt, shame and coyness by children with autism. It was hypothesised that these self-conscious emotions develop through a child's ability to identify with others' attitudes towards the self and that children with autism have a limited ability to identify with others this way. Correspondingly, it is expected that they will be limited in their ability to express and perhaps experience these emotions. The series of studies presented in this thesis investigate the recognition and expression of these self- conscious emotions in children with autism, relative to a chronological and verbal age matched group of children without autism. In the first study, parents were asked to describe a range of socio-emotional behaviour of their children with autism. The second study focused on parent reports of the expression of pride, guilt and shame in their children. The third study examined participants' recognition of these emotions in video-clips of enacted scenarios. Participants were then interviewed to explore their own experiences of pride, guilt and shame. Finally situations were designed to elicit pride, guilt and coyness in participants and their responses were recorded and rated. The results from the studies offer substantial but qualified support for the hypothesis. Collectively, they present a complex picture of both spared and impaired aspects of pride, guilt, shame and coyness in children with autism.
... Among the various general cognitive abilities (e.g., language ability and episodic memory: Naito, 2003;Ruffman, Slade & Crowe, 2002), measures of IQ are considered as major confounding factors in studying ToM (Yirmiya, Solomonica-Levi, Shulman & Pilowsky, 1996). However, the findings regarding the associations between performance on ToM tasks and measures of IQ are rather equivocal in various clinical populations (e.g., schizophrenia, autistic spectrum disorders) and healthy controls (e.g., Bora, Yucel & Pantelis, 2009;Brune, 2003;Buitelaar, van der Wees, Swaab-Barneveld & van der Gaag, 1999;Harrington, Siegert & McClure, 2005;Hur, Byun, Shin et al., 2013;Ozonoff et al., 1991;Peterson & Miller, 2012;Pickup, 2008;Sprong, Schothorst, Vos, Hox & van Engeland, 2007;Yirmiya, Sigman, Kasari & Mundy, 1992). Of interest, verbal IQ has been associated with performance on the RMET (Ahmed & Stephen Miller, 2011;Golan, Baron-Cohen, Hill & Golan, 2006;Kenyon, Samarawickrema, Dejong et al., 2012;Peterson & Miller, 2012;Stanford, Messinger, Malaspina & Corcoran, 2011). ...
... In addition, in a study by Ozonoff et al. (1991), with high-functioning autistic individuals, none of verbal IQ, performance IQ, EF, or verbal memory were found to predict success on emotion recognition tasks. Of interest, Yirmiya et al. (1992) found that the quality of empathetic understanding and emotional perspective taking in high-functioning children with autism showed significant positive correlations with verbal IQ and full-scale IQ. The strong correlation between RMET and verbal IQ may be indicative of the participants' use of verbal material to deciphering others' mental states, possibly as a way to compensate for ToM difficulties (Tager-Flusberg, 2000). ...
This article investigates emotion recognition ability, a central aspect of Theory of Mind (ToM), in a group of individuals with spina bifida myelomeningocele (SBM) experiencing executive function deficits, and examine associations between emotion recognition, and intellectual and executive functioning. A total of 38 adult subjects with SBM were included in this study, participating in a randomized controlled trial evaluating the effects of a cognitive rehabilitation intervention for executive dysfunction. Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) was used as a measure of emotion recognition, and neuropsychological tests and questionnaires were utilized as executive function measures. One third of the participants performed poorer on the emotion recognition task compared to normative data. Emotion recognition may represent an area being affected in adults with SBM, and it is related to verbal IQ. Findings also suggest that executive functions and emotion recognition ability in adults with SBM are independent.
... These data were primarily from release 4.0 (with a few exceptions, where relevant data were available in release 3.0 but not 4.0-see S1 Table in S1 File), and are available through the National Institute of Mental Health Data Archive [105]. Participants with diagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder, bipolar disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or unspecified schizophrenia spectrum or other psychotic disorders were excluded from the study, as individuals with such disorders may have significant disorder-related differences in empathy or expression of empathy and related processes, which were beyond the scope of this study [106][107][108][109][110][111][112][113][114][115]. A total of 11062 youth at baseline and 9832 who also had 2-year follow up data were studied. ...
Empathy is at the core of our social world, yet multidomain factors that affect its development in socially sensitive periods, such as adolescence, are incompletely understood. To address this gap, this study investigated associations between social, environmental and mental health factors, and their temporal changes, on adolescent empathetic behaviors/emotions and, for comparison, callous unemotional (CU) traits and behaviors, in the early longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development sample (baseline: n = 11062; 2-year follow-up: n = 9832, median age = 119 and 144 months, respectively). Caregiver affection towards the youth, liking school, having a close friend, and importance of religious beliefs/spirituality in the youth’s life were consistently positively correlated with empathetic behaviors/emotions across assessments (p<0.001, Cohen’s f = ~0.10). Positive family dynamics and cohesion, living in a neighborhood that shared the family’s values, but also parent history of substance use and (aggregated) internalizing problems were additionally positively associated with one or more empathetic behaviors at follow-up (p<0.001, f = ~0.10). In contrast, externalizing problems, anxiety, depression, fear of social situations, and being withdrawn were negatively associated with empathetic behaviors and positively associated with CU traits and behaviors (p<0.001, f = ~0.1–0.44). The latter were also correlated with being cyberbullied and/or discriminated against, anhedonia, and impulsivity, and their interactions with externalizing and internalizing issues. Significant positive temporal correlations of behaviors at the two assessments indicated positive (early) developmental empathetic behavior trajectories, and negative CU traits’ trajectories. Negative changes in mental health adversely moderated positive trajectories and facilitated negative ones. These findings highlight that adolescent empathetic behaviors/emotions are positively related to multidomain protective social environmental factors, but simultaneously adversely associated with risk factors in the same domains, as well as bully victimization, discrimination, and mental health problems. Risk factors instead facilitate the development of CU traits and behaviors.
... That is, people who passed the test were not deemed to pass by the same means as non-autistic people, instead by using a different logic they were deemed to have "hacked" the test and thus, still not have "normal" theory of mind, thereby preserving the theory. Follow-up studies routinely found that that autistic people used language clearly demonstrating theory of mind (Nuyts and Roeck, 1997), that the effect was either missing (Aldridge et al., 2000;Russell and Hill, 2001;Sebanz et al., 2005), not universal to all autistic people (Ozonoff et al., 1994;Happé, 1995;Peterson, 2002), nor unique to autism (Benson et al., 1993) and heavily dependent on language and age (Yirmiya et al., 1992(Yirmiya et al., , 1998. Similarly, autistic people were publishing autobiographies and writing on autism that demonstrates theory of mind, and largely went ignored (Hacking, 2009). ...
... Research conducted with populations with neurodevelopmental conditions, such as autism and Down Syndrome were analysed separately due to difficulties making generalisations about this group to individuals with typical development. This was for multiple reasons: first, a core component of the diagnosis of autism is having difficulties with understanding the emotional and mental states of others; for example, through facial expressions (Baron-Cohen 1997;Hobson, 1986;Yirmiya et al., 1992), Second, components of the diagnosis mean that individuals with Down Syndrome may have greater difficulty engaging in experiments examining positive modelling (Thurman & Mervis, 2013); for example, a learning disability may make it more challenging to understand the tasks (Mencap, 2021), and common health problems such as hearing loss and eye diseases may negatively impede interpretation of positive modelling (CDC, 2021). ...
Fear of specific stimuli is thought to develop through associative learning mechanisms and research indicates that a form of observational (vicarious) learning known as positive modelling can counter these effects. This systematic review examined and synthesised the experimental positive modelling literature to establish its efficacy for reducing fear. Psych Info, Medline and the Psychology and Behavioural Science Collection databases were systematically searched until August 2021. Of the 1,677 papers identified, 18 experiments across 14 articles met the inclusion criteria. In the majority of these, positive modelling was found to lower fear levels in one or more of three procedures: fear prevention, fear reduction and fear reversal. Procedures inform prevention and treatment initiatives for specific phobias in several ways. The overall efficacy of positive modelling techniques and the ease in which they can be implemented highlight the importance of further research to evaluate their inclusion in prevention and treatment interventions. More research is required to establish the longevity and transferability of positive modelling.
... Findings on empathic abilities in ASC child populations have also been heterogeneous. For example, while children with ASC have been found to react less empathically towards emotional vignettes compared to matched controls (Yirmiya et al., 1992), similar empathic reactions in response to other emotional stimuli have been observed in ASC and non-ASC children (Capps et al., 1993). Thus, similar to the speculation in adult populations, these contradictory results may be a consequence of the children's co-occurring alexithymia. ...
Recent evidence suggests that, contrary to traditional views, empathy difficulties may not be a core feature of autism; but are rather due to co-occurring alexithymia. Empathy, alexithymia and autistic traits have yet to be examined concurrently in children. Therefore, we examined the co-occurrence of empathy difficulties and alexithymia in 59 typically developing and 5 autistic children. Multiple measures (self-report, parent-report and a behavioural task) were used to evaluate empathy and to assess differences in self-and parent-reports using multiple regressions. Alexithymia was found to predict empathy significantly better than autistic traits, providing support for the alexithymia hypothesis. From a therapeutic perspective, results suggest autistic children who screen positive for elevated alexithymic traits may benefit from additional support targeting emotion identification.
... For further insights regarding the emotional and relational spheres in Autistic Syndromes, see Joly et al. (2015), Micheli (1998), Alvarez (1999, Yirmiya (1992), Fonagy, Target (2005), Sbattella (2006Sbattella ( , 2013, Ballerini (2006). ...
The paper presents an artistic experience aimed at developing the vocal and emotional expressiveness of young people with intellectual, relational and physical disabilities. It follows the Esagramma® methodology, called Affective Vocal Education (EVA), and focuses on the production of a radio-drama based on the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. It was realized by an actor and a sound engineer together with 5 girls and 1 boy with various diagnoses affecting their verbal and relational skills. A specific methodology allowed us to quantify macroscopic dialogic and prosodic variations before and after the artistic experience, by extracting a set of suprasegmental features thanks to a pre- and a post-test recording of spontaneous and elicited speech. Moreover, the paper describes the development of the theatrical script, the operational and artistic choices as well as the analysis of the complexity of the radio-drama from a linguistic point of view.
Il radiodramma come modalità artistica per migliorare le capacità espressive nella disabilità intellettive e nell’autismo: uno studio sperimentale
L’articolo presenta un percorso artistico volto a sviluppare l’espressività vocale ed emotiva di giovani con disabilità intellettive, relazionali e fisiche. L’attività svolta segue la metodologia Esagramma®, denominata Affective Vocal Education (EVA) e si concentra sulla produzione di un dramma radiofonico basato sul Roman de la Rose di Guillaume de Lorris e Jean de Meun. Il prodotto audio è stato realizzato da un attore e un ingegnere del suono insieme a 5 ragazze e 1 ragazzo con varie disabilità che ne influenzano le capacità verbali e relazionali. Una specifica metodologia permette di quantificare le variazioni macroscopiche dialogiche e prosodiche prima e dopo il percorso artistico, tramite l’estrazione di un insieme di caratteristiche soprasegmentali da registrazioni raccolte sia prima che dopo il percorso. L’articolo descrive inoltre lo sviluppo della sceneggiatura teatrale, le scelte esecutive ed artistiche e l’analisi della complessità del radiodramma dal punto di vista linguistico.
... However, it seems no consensus has been reached, and instead, it is generally accepted that people with ASD have a limited capacity to take account of others' thoughts and feelings as a result of the functional impairment of the amygdala [22,86]. Additionally, it can be assumed that this is a problem of imbalance of overall empathic abilities, not an absence [52,84,86,98]. Most of all, several studies argue that the empathic skills of autism can be improved by appropriate interventions, particularly throughout childhood and adolescence [22,35,51,83,84]. ...
It is very challenging for children with autism to express their emotions to others as well as to recognise others’ feelings accurately. As social difficulties of autistic people might aggravate their loneliness and social isolation, a holistic development is required from an early age. This study aimed to suggest a digital intervention for supporting autistic children’s empathy development by using design thinking. This study developed a mobile-interface design on the basis of the human-centred design approach, and a prototype was evaluated by stakeholders with respect to acceptability and usability. Usability was measured by twelve statements of a combination of design guidelines and the system usability scale, and subsequently, open-end interview questions were offered to collect data regarding acceptability. The separate interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and thus, meaningful data were selected and clustered by themes. The result of the qualitative data analysis is represented by eighteen themes in five categories. Altogether, this research suggests a phased (bit-by-bit) strategy for teaching empathy of children with ASD through a digital intervention.
... The fact that general language abilities covaried with affective ToM attribution also is supported by the argument by Frith and colleagues that, in individuals with ASD, it is possible that the associations between standard ToM and language (along with IQ) are stronger than in TDs (Frith et al.1994). This finding resonates with the cognitive-compensation or logicoaffective hypothesis (Capps et al. 1992;Hermelin andO'Connor 1985, as cited in Schopler andMesibov 1995;Yirmiya et al. 1992), which supports the idea that children with ASD, as opposed to TDs, use their cognitive abilities to derive the correct answers from verbal and cognitive information rather that personal experiences, in order to deal with the demands of the affective ToM tasks (Begeer et al. 2007;Capps et al. 1992;Kasari et al. 2001;Lindner and Rosén 2006). Our results fit those of other studies, showing that even the most cognitively able individuals with ASD experience difficulties in understanding and reacting appropriately to others' emotions (Howlin 1997;Lockwood et al. 2013;Lord 1993;Ponnet et al. 2008). ...
Substantial research indicates that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties with Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities, but rarely have studies used a comprehensive battery to measure both the cognitive and affective aspects of ToM. The present study tested this ability in 24 Greek-speaking children with ASD (ages 7–14), and their performance was compared to 24 age-, gender- and language- matched typically developing controls. Results showed that ASD children’s performance was selectively impaired in both ToM aspects, supporting the distinction between ToM components. This is the first study of ToM abilities among Greek- speaking children with ASD, and the findings confirm that children with ASD are experiencing difficulties with socio-emotional understanding across languages and cultures.
... As theory of mind was claimed to be a central part of "humanness" (Baron-Cohen, 1999;Povinelli et al., 1996;Tomasello, 1998) by 2002, it was circulating media that autistic people were missing humanness (Gernsbacher, 2007). Yet on the basis of theory of mind it was then put forward that autistic individuals had extreme male brains and, that they were incapable of empathy as theory of mind is a pre-requisite (Baron-Cohen, 2002;Baron-Cohen, 2009), which as will be explain in paragraphs below in this section, is also considered a key component of human-uniqueness (Haslam, 2006), despite evidence being available that autistic children displayed "surprisingly high" empathy (Yirmiya et al., 1992). ...
This thesis aimed to investigate the role of minority stress (MS) and autistic community connectedness (ACC) on mental health (MH) and wellbeing in the autistic community. Multiple methods were used, across four studies. Study one consisted of a qualitative study using grounded theory tools to create a measure of ACC, as none existed. The findings indicated that ACC compromises of three sub-domains – belongingness, social, and political connectedness. Stigma and identity both informed the level of ACC experienced by participants. In study two, a measure of ACC was created and validated in a new sample of autistic individuals (N = 133) using confirmatory factor analysis to test factor-structure and for item purification. Results indicated factorial, convergent and discriminant validity, for a 10-item scale. Studies three and four consisted of a cross-sectional and longitudinal survey where 195 autistic and 181 non-autistic people completed questionnaires at baseline and 99 autistic participants completed measures nine months later at follow-up. Resilience resources, ACC, MH and wellbeing, and MS were measured both times. Study three showed that the differences in MH, wellbeing, and resilience resources between the autistic and non-autistic sample persisted beyond demographics and general stress. Higher MS predicted lower MH and wellbeing, while ACC moderated the relationship between MS and MH, ameliorating the effects of MS. The longitudinal study (study four) showed that higher MS scores at baseline were associated with worse MH and wellbeing nine-months later, while higher ACC was associated with better MH and wellbeing. The results suggest a model of ACC and MS whereby autistic people may experience differing levels of ACC depending on experiences of stigma and autistic identity. This ACC in turn moderates the impact of MS on MH.These findings and implications of the research are further integrated into autism, MS, MH, and community literature.
... Examining reward circuitry responses to vicarious rewards is important in light of the established differences in empathy and perspective-taking or "theory of mind" in ASD [76][77][78][79]. Notably, empathy is defined as a multidimensional construct, consisting of both cognitive and affective components [80][81][82]. ...
Previous studies examining the neural substrates of reward processing in ASD have explored responses to rewards for oneself but not rewards earned for others (i.e., vicarious reward). This omission is notable given that vicarious reward processing is a critical component of creating and maintaining social relationships. The current study examined the neural mechanisms of vicarious reward processing in 15 adults with ASD and 15 age- and gender-matched typically developing controls. Individuals with ASD demonstrated attenuated activation of reward-related regions during vicarious reward processing. Altered connectivity was also observed in individuals with ASD during reward receipt. These findings of altered neural sensitivity to vicarious reward processing may represent a mechanism that hinders the development of social abilities in ASD.
... Several studies have documented that adolescents and adults with ASC show significant difficulties recognizing and expressing emotions [3,4]. These difficulties are apparent when individuals with ASC attempt to recognize emotions from facial expressions [76,77,78,79], from vocal intonation [80,81], from gestures and body language [82,83], and from the integration of multimodal emotional information in context [84,85,86]. Limited emotional expressiveness in nonverbal communication is also characteristic in ASC, and studies have demonstrated that individuals with ASC have difficulties directing appropriate facial expressions to others [87,88], modulating their vocal intonation appropriately when expressing emotion [27,89,90,91] and using appropriate gestures and body language [92]. ...
... In other words sadness demands or impels concern or caring behaviour. For example, in studies with preschool children, when an experimenter pretends to be sad or hurt, two year old children will typically will show comforting behaviour towards them (Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992), and even some preschoolers with ASD will do so (Yirmiya, Sigman, Kasari, & Mundy, 1992). ...
Psychology is biased towards thinking of emotions as feelings rather than as an experiences of the world. But they are both. World-focused emotion experiences (WFEE) are how the world appears or is consciously perceived in one's emotion experience. For example, when happy the world may seem welcoming, or when sad the world may seem barren of possibilities. What explains these experiences? This article discusses explanations of WFEE from phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. Influenced by Lewin, I propose an “emotional demand model” of WFEE. The emotional demand character of objects (e.g. bear-to-be-run-from) is distinguished from their expressive character (e.g. angry bear). It is a mistake to think of emotion faces only as expressions—they are also demands. This distinction explains some anomalous findings in infancy and autism research. The model highlights another tool for recognizing our own emotions: noticing when we feel “demanded of” by the world, with implications for emotion regulation.
... Τρεις δεκαετίες έρευνας έχουν δείξει ότι τα παιδιά και οι ενήλικες µε ∆ΑΦ έχουν σηµαντικές δυσκολίες αναγνώρισης και έκφρασης των συναισθηµάτων και ψυχικών καταστάσεων (Hobson 1995, Baron-Cohen 1997. Αυτές οι δυσκολίες είναι εµφανείς όταν τα άτοµα µε ∆ΑΦ αναγνωρίζουν τα συναισθήµατα από τις εκφράσεις του προσώπου (Hobson 1986, Celani 1999, Deruelle 2004, Golan 2006, από τον φωνητικό τονισµό (Boucher 2003, Golan 2007, από τις χειρονοµίες και τη γλώσσα του σώµατος (Grezes 2009, Philip 2010, και από την ενσωµάτωση των πολυτροπικών συναισθηµατικών πληροφοριών σε αυτό το πλαίσιο (Yirmiya 1992, Golan 2008, Silverman 2010. Περιορισµένη συναισθηµατική εκφραστικότητα σε µη-λεκτική επικοινωνία είναι επίσης χαρακτηριστική στο ∆ΑΦ. ...
It is estimated that 5 million people in the EU countries (1% of the population) are in the autism spectrum. ASC-Inclusion is a new tool that has been studied, designed and constantly evolving from a multidisciplinary team of prestigious Universities and Organizations in Europe. It is an online platform that helps children with autism disorders and their carers. The results of its use are particularly important since there is a significant improvement in the socialization of children with autism disorders, improved adaptive behavior at home and at school, improved emotional expression and emotional recognition. Its further development and implementation is expected to have major social and economic repercussions.
... This lack of the typical specialization may be compensated by a slower and more cognitively demanding mechanism in ASD individuals with normal or above normal cognitive abilities (Neumann et al., 2006;Clark et al., 2008;Santos et al., 2008;Weigelt et al., 2012;Livingston and Happé, 2017). However, rapid facial processing is necessary for the development of more complex socially relevant cognitive functions (García-Villamisar et al., 2010), such as inter-subjectivity (Yirmiya et al., 1992), pragmatic communication ...
One of the most important and early impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the abnormal visual processing of human faces. This deficit has been associated with hypoactivation of the fusiform face area (FFA), one of the main hubs of the face-processing network. Neurofeedback based on real-time fMRI (rtfMRI-NF) is a technique that allows the self-regulation of circumscribed brain regions, leading to specific neural modulation and behavioral changes. The aim of the present study was to train participants with ASD to achieve up-regulation of the FFA using rtfMRI-NF, to investigate the neural effects of FFA up-regulation in ASD. For this purpose, three groups of volunteers with normal I.Q. and fluent language were recruited to participate in a rtfMRI-NF protocol of eight training runs in 2 days. Five subjects with ASD participated as part of the experimental group and received contingent feedback to up-regulate bilateral FFA. Two control groups, each one with three participants with typical development (TD), underwent the same protocol: one group with contingent feedback and the other with sham feedback. Whole-brain and functional connectivity analysis using each fusiform gyrus as independent seeds were carried out. The results show that individuals with TD and ASD can achieve FFA up-regulation with contingent feedback. RtfMRI-NF in ASD produced more numerous and stronger short-range connections among brain areas of the ventral visual stream and an absence of the long-range connections to insula and inferior frontal gyrus, as observed in TD subjects. Recruitment of inferior frontal gyrus was observed in both groups during FAA up-regulation. However, insula and caudate nucleus were only recruited in subjects with TD. These results could be explained from a neurodevelopment perspective as a lack of the normal specialization of visual processing areas, and a compensatory mechanism to process visual information of faces. RtfMRI-NF emerges as a potential tool to study visual processing network in ASD, and to explore its clinical potential.
... Otizmlilerin bencil olarak nitelenmesinin ardında ise empati konusunda normal gelişim gösteren insanlara kıyasla daha yetersiz olmalarının yattığı düşünülebilir. Zira yapılan pek çok araştırmada otizmlilerde, empati yeteneği bulunmakla beraber empati kurabilme de normal gelişim gösteren bireylerden daha yetersiz oldukları sonucuna ulaşılmıştır (Gleichgerrcht vd., 2013;Krahn ve Fenton, 2009;Senland ve D'Alessandro, 2013;Yirmiya vd., 1992). Ancak bu durumun dini inançlara yansıyıp yansımayacağı konusunda kesin bir hükme varmak mümkün değildir. ...
Otizm; sosyal iletişimde yetersizlikler, duygusal tepkilerin gösterilememesi, tekrarlanan takıntılı davranışlar gibi belirtilerle kendini gösteren bir gelişim bozukluğudur. Otizm belirtileri yaşamın ilk yıllarında kendini göstermektedir. Bu durum otizm teşhisi konulan çocukların eğitimine erken yaşlarda başlanmasına imkân tanıması bakımından avantaj olarak değerlendirilebilir. Tanısı koyulmuş otizmli bireylerin eğitimi gerek özel eğitim okullarında gerekse kaynaştırma yoluyla devam ettirilmektedir. Otizmlilerin, din ve ahlak konusundaki eğitimi ise tartışma konusu olmuştur. Otizmlilerin dini kavram ve olguları anlamlandıramayacağına yönelik çalışmalara karşın olumlu sonuçlara ulaşılmış araştırmalar da mevcuttur. Ahlak ve değerler eğitimi konusunda da benzer zıtlıkları içeren araştırmalara rastlanmaktadır. Ülkemizde otizmlilerde din ve ahlak eğitimine dair bilimsel araştırmalar mevcut olmamakla birlikte 2010 yılında, DKAB derslerinin zorunlu olarak otizmli bireylerin eğitim programlarında yer alması konuyu gündeme taşımıştır. Buradan yola çıkılarak bu araştırmada, otizmlilerde din ve ahlak eğitiminin imkanına dair tartışmalara değinilerek, birbirine zıt görüşler içeren konu, otizmlilerin eğitiminde aileden sonra en etkili bireyler olan öğretmenlerin görüşlerine açılmıştır. Yarı yapılandırılmış görüşme tekniğiyle yapılan araştırmanın çalışma grubunu Konya ili merkez ilçelerinde (Karatay, Meram, Selçuklu) bulunan özel eğitim okullarında ve bünyesinde otizm sınıfı bulunan ortaokullarda görev yapmakta olan 30 özel eğitim ve bu okullarda derslere giren 6 DKAB öğretmeni oluşturmaktadır. Araştırma sonucunda, çalışmaya katılan öğretmenlerin otizmlilerde din ve ahlak eğitiminin imkanına yönelik farklı görüşlerde oldukları ancak din ve ahlak teması altına giren birtakım konularda otizmlilerin bir eğitime ihtiyacı olduğu noktasında fikir birliğine sahip oldukları görülmüştür. Yapılan çalışmanın literatürdeki tartışmalara, öğretmenlerin görüş ve tecrübelerinin katılması yönüyle katkı sağlayacağı düşünülmektedir.
... However, children with autism can accurately represent some mental states such as simple desires and emotions (e.g., Tan and Harris 1991;Yirmiya et al. 1992), true beliefs (e.g., Sparrevohn and Howie 1995), and intentions (e.g., Carpenter et al. 1998;Russell and Hill 2001;Grant et al. 2005). And children with high-functioning autism usually make correct false belief inferences, perhaps because they use compensatory verbal strategies (e.g., Bauminger and Kasari 1999;Bowler 1992;Happé 1994Happé , 1995. ...
... Facial expression is the core of human emotional expression, but many studies have proved that autistic children have obstacles in recognizing six basic emotions [29][30][31][32][33][34]. The basic emotional theory, proposed by Ekman, defines six basic human emotions as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. ...
Emotionally interactive robots with facial expressions have various applications, such as research, education, companion, entertainment, and so on. Apart from this, robots with facial expressions demonstrate unique therapeutic effects via eye contact, facial expression recognition and presentation, especially in the early intervention for autistic children. The present study focuses on the head design of a humanoid robot with facial expressions and demonstrates strong attraction of the emotional robotic head presented in the 20th China Hi-Tech Fair. Feedback of the general public's acceptance of the robotic head during the High-tech Fair, was combined with the special needs in treatment of autism, to optimize the design of a second generation of the robotic head. As a result, the mechanical structures of the key components of the head, including the shell of the head, the eyes, the neck, the tongue, achieved better performance, and fewer motors were used to generate more and reliable facial expressions. TPE material which is environmentally friendly and bio-compatible was used in making a more human-like skin covering the robotic head. The facial expressions of the big six basic emotions presented by the robotic head has been tested by the Face++ software, and the recognition accuracy of some facial expressions exceeded 96%. The contributions of the present study are threefold, first of all, it shows that limited number of motors can generate reliable facial expressions of the basic emotions; second, TPE material is suitable for making human-like skin covering the robotic head; third, it shows the potential of our robotic head to be a practical and clinical rehabilitation platform of training autistic patients to recognize and imitate facial expressions of emotions.
... Individuals with autism seem to lack the capacity of perspective taking, which requires the consideration that the other person has a different representation of the world to oneself, either a different visual representation or a different belief (Nilsen and Graham 2009). Earlier research has indicated that children with autism are able to give examples of feeling states from their own experience, and many of them showed considerable ability to label the emotions of others, to take the role and perspective of others, and to respond empathetically to the feelings of others (Yirmiya et al. 1992). Nonetheless, they performed less well than typically developing children on labeling the emotion felt by others, in assuming the role and perspective of others, and in responding with empathy. ...
Humans need empathy to promote social interactions and to display prosocial behavior. Therefore, it is not surprising that low empathy skills are commonly seen as diagnostic features in several mental disorders. Empathy is an interesting topic in autism, since low empathy skills are responsible for the social difficulties that individuals with autism experience. The lack of agreement among researchers on empathy and autism, however, indicates that we need to redefine the characteristics of empathy in autism, which is the aim of our study. We hypothesize that children and adolescents with autism are impaired in three abilities required for empathy: (1) recognition of emotions, (2) sharing of emotional states, and (3) perspective taking. Since empathy ability measures are useful and are capable in distinguishing autism from other disorders, it is evident that these measures are used in clinical practice. Therefore, we recommend, in order to identify autism in clinical practice, at least the use of an instrument which is specialized in measuring one’s empathy abilities, with regard to recognizing emotions, sharing emotional states and perspective taking.
... i.a. Hermelin and O'Connor, 1970;Baron-Cohen et al., 1985;Denckla, 1986;Frith, 1991;Rogers and Pennington, 1991;Tager-Flusberg, 1992;Yirmiya et al., 1992;Rapin and Dunn, 1997). However, in this context, research has focused more specifically on the co-occurrence of these issues with specific characteristics typical of alexithymia such as the difficulty identifying and attributing emotions (Hill et al., 2004;Moriguchi et al., 2006;Silani et al., 2008;Cook et al., 2013), an excessively pragmatic and utilitarian thinking style (Patil et al., 2016), poor emotional lexicon (Lartseva et al., 2015), difficulties understanding metaphorical language (Wotschak and Klann-Delius, 2013), issues with the interpretation of nonverbal clues (Bird et al., 2011), aprosody (Heaton et al., 2012), difficulties with emotion regulation and emotional expression (Weiss et al., 2014;Costa et al., 2017), and difficulty discriminating bodily sensations due to an altered somatic sensibility (Liss et al., 2008;Shah et al., 2016;Gaigg et al., 2018). ...
Alexithymia is a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness which has been gaining diagnostic prevalence in a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, with notably high rates of overlap with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the nature of its role in ASD symptomatology remains elusive. Here, we distill research at the intersection of alexithymia and ASD. After a brief synopsis of the studies that played a pioneering role in the identification of the overlapping fields between alexithymia and ASD, we comb the literature for evidence of its overlap with ASD in terms of prevalence, etiology, and behaviors. Through a formalized framework of the process of emotional interpretation and expression, we explore evidence for where and how deficits arise in this complex network of events. We portray how these relate to the dynamic interplay between alexithymic and autistic traits and find emerging evidence that alexithymia is both a cause and consequence of autistic behaviors. We end with a strategic proposal for future research and interventions to dampen the impacts of alexithymia in ASD.
... (The emotional capacities of persons with autism are discussed at length in Stout [2016b] and Stout [2017]. See also Yirmiya [1992]; Blair [1999]; Rogers et al. [2007]; Dziobek et al. [2008]; Hirvelä and Helkama [2011].) autism, metacognition, and the deep self 457 ...
Many ‘deep self’ theories of moral responsibility characterize the deep self as necessarily requiring that an agent be able to reflect on her own cognitive states in various ways. In this paper, I argue that these metacognitive abilities are not actually a necessary feature of the deep self. In order to show this, I appeal to empirical evidence from research on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) that suggests that individuals with ASD have striking impairments in metacognitive abilities. I then argue that metacognitive conceptions of the deep self are implausible insofar as they fail to give a satisfactory account of the responsibility of persons with autism.
... Other studies have been undertaken which have helped to corroborate this fact. Yirmiya et al. (1992), for example, tested the capacity for empathy in high-functioning individuals with ASD and, in so doing, asked subjects to verbally report emotional experiences that they had had, and many of the autistic participants were able to do so. Several other studies have subsequently taken place and have produced similar results. ...
This paper aims to further examine the relationship between self-awareness and agency by focusing on the role that emotional awareness plays in prominent conceptions of responsibility. One promising way of approaching this task is by focusing on individuals who display impairments in emotional awareness and then examining the effects (if any) that these impairments have on their apparent responsibility for the actions that they perform. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as well as other clinical groups who evince high degrees of the personality construct known as alexithymia, I will argue, do, in fact, display impairments in emotional self-awareness, and, so, may provide some insight into the relationship between this awareness and the capacity for responsible agency. More specifically, individuals with ASD may provide us with evidence that robust emotional self-awareness is not a necessary condition for responsible agency or that lacking such a capacity could undermine some otherwise plausible sufficient conditions for responsibility. The aim of the paper, then, is twofold. First, it will aim to show that ASD ought to be understood, in part, as a disorder of emotional self-awareness. Section 2 presents evidence relating to the emotional profile characteristic of individuals with ASD and argues that the most striking feature of this profile is the way in which the individual seems to be separated from his or her emotions in an important sense. Second, the paper aims to show that this distinctive feature of the emotions in ASD casts serious doubt on some prominent accounts of moral responsibility. To this end, section 3.1 presents a challenge to some widely accepted “subjective conditions” for responsibility, namely those articulated by John Martin Fischer and Ravizza (1998) and makes a case, based on the empirical data regarding autism, that these conditions actually are not necessary for one’s being a responsible agent. Section 3.2 then presents a challenge for theories of responsible agency which assign primary importance to the connection between an agent’s actions and her judgment-sensitive attitudes. I argue there that the evidence from autism suggests that these theories fail in their efforts to provide sufficient conditions for responsibility.
Metacognition -the human ability to recognize correct decisions- is a key cognitive process linked to learning and development. Several recent studies investigated the relationship between metacognition and autism. However, the evidence is still inconsistent. While some studies reported autistic people having lower levels of metacognitive sensitivity, others did not. Leveraging the fact that autistic traits are present in the general population, our study investigated the relationship between visual metacognition and autistic traits in a sample of 360 neurotypical participants. We measured metacognition as the correspondence between confidence and accuracy in a visual two alternative forced choice task. Autistic-traits were assessed through the Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ) score. A regression analysis revealed no statistically significant association between autistic traits and metacognition or confidence. Furthermore, we found no link between AQ sub-scales and metacognition. We do not find support for the hypothesis that autistic traits are associated with metacognition in the general population.
Socially situated thought and behaviour are pervasive and vitally important in human society. The social brain has become a focus of study for researchers in the neurosciences, psychology, biology and other areas of behavioural science, and it is becoming increasingly clear that social behaviour is heavily dependent on shared representations. Any social activity, from a simple conversation to a well-drilled military exercise to an exquisitely perfected dance routine, involves information sharing between the brains of those involved. This volume comprises a collection of cutting-edge essays centred on the idea of shared representations, broadly defined. Featuring contributions from established world leaders in their fields and written in a simultaneously accessible and detailed style, this is an invaluable resource for established researchers and those who are new to the field.
The present study investigates involvement in cyberbullying and empathy skills, as well as the relationship between the two among general education sixth grade elementary school students with and without special educational needs (SEN). Specifically, 120 students with SEN (Autistic Spectrum Disorder‐ASD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder‐ADHD, learning disabilities) and 120 students without SEN from 29 randomly selected schools of the second biggest city in Greece completed a self‐report questionnaire, which included a short version of the “Cyberbullying Questionnaire” (Smith et al., An investigation into cyber bullying, its forms, awareness and impact, and the relationship between age and gender in cyber bullying. A report to the Anti‐Bullying Alliance. Unit for School and Family Studies, 2006) and the “Basic Empathy Scale”—BES (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006, J Adolesc, 29:589, 2006). The results showed that, regardless of gender, involvement in cyberbullying (as victims/bullies) concerned primarily students with SEN, mainly those with ASD and ADHD. Accordingly, students with SEN and mostly those with ASD expressed lower affective and cognitive empathy compared to the rest of the students. Finally, for all the participating students both affective and cognitive empathy negatively predicted engagement in cyberbullying (as victims/bullies). Implications for preventive actions in elementary education, and especially for children with SEN, are discussed in detail.
We aimed to investigate pain empathy ability and self-reported empathy among parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Twenty-four parents of children with ASD and 26 parents of typically developing children completed the Empathy Quotient (EQ) self-report scale and responded to painful or neutral images during an empathy-for-pain paradigm test. Parents of children with ASD had lower EQ scores, lower accuracy, and longer reaction time (RT) for pain empathy task response (all p < 0.05) compared with controls. There was a negative relationship between cognitive empathy, social skills, total EQ scores, and RT of response in parents of children with ASD. Our findings indicate that self-reported empathy deficits and decreased empathy response to the sight of others' pain in parents of children with ASD are part of a broader autistic phenotype.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is neurodevelopmental disorder which is characterized by lack of social behaviors and impaired non-verbal interactions that start early in childhood. It can also lead to progressive neurodegeneration like schizophrenia disorder, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and dementia. Genetic studies of ASD have confirmed the mutations that interfere with neurodevelopment in mother's womb through childhood and these mutations are further involved in synaptogenesis and axon motility. Crucial role of amygdala is found to be deficit in ASD individuals whose association cognition with nucleus accumbens lead to impaired social behaviors and cognitive stimulus. Educational and behavioral treatments are considered the key steps used for its management along with pharmacological and interventional therapies. In this chapter, the author presents the etiology of ASD, proof of neurodegeneration in ASD, as well as the clinical feature and the management of ASD.
Daily functioning involves identifying emotions in spoken language, a fundamental aspect of social interactions. To date, there is inconsistent evidence in the literature on whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder without intellectual disability (ASD-without-ID) experience difficulties in identification of spoken emotions. We conducted a meta-analysis (literature search following the PRISMA guidelines), with 26 data sets (taken from 23 peer-reviewed journal articles) comparing individuals with ASD-without-ID (N = 614) and typically-developed (TD) controls (N = 640), from nine countries and in seven languages (published until February 2020). In our analyses there was no sufficient evidence to suggest that individuals with HF-ASD differ from matched controls in the identification of simple prosodic emotions (e.g., sadness, happiness). However, individuals with ASD-without-ID were found to perform significantly worse than controls in identification of complex prosodic emotions (e.g., envy and boredom). The level of the semantic content of the stimuli presented (e.g., sentences vs. strings of digits) was not found to have an impact on the results. In conclusion, the difference in findings between simple and complex emotions calls for a new-look on emotion processing in ASD-without-ID. Intervention programs may rely on the intact abilities of individuals with ASD-without-ID to process simple emotions and target improved performance with complex emotions.
Lay summary
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder without intellectual disability (ASD-without-ID) do not differ from matched controls in the identification of simple prosodic emotions (e.g., sadness, happiness). However, they were found to perform significantly worse than controls in the identification of complex prosodic emotions (e.g., envy, boredom). This was found in a meta-analysis of 26 data sets with 1254 participants from nine countries and in seven languages. Intervention programs may rely on the intact abilities of individuals with ASD-without-ID to process simple emotions.
This study aims to evaluate the predictive capacity of executive dysfunction and social adaptation in performance in facial emotion recognition. The sample consisted of 31 adults with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The variables that maintain significant correlations with emotional perception were taken as independent variables. Multiple regression analysis was used to identify the predictors of the facial stimuli perception in population with ASD. The results demonstrated a relationship between social maturity and emotional perception. Better scores in communication, socialization and daily life skills predict better performance in the perception of facial stimuli, both emotional and non-emotional.
In this perspective paper, we review established areas of ASD emotional difficulties in relation to “emotional intelligence” (EI) theoretical frameworks. Existing literature suggests that people with ASD have lower EI on average in the domains of perceiving emotions from the environment and body language, using emotions to relate to other’s experience, understanding emotions based on contextual cues, and managing emotions in the self and others. Poorer EI in ASD may detract from academic success, even when cognitive intelligence is intact. We conclude by considering the manner in which EI interventions in special education classrooms and school settings, formerly termed “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) programs, can be adapted to promote EI in children with ASD.
This chapter explores three models (mutual independence, limited collaboration, and constructive integration) of interdisciplinary interaction between neuroscience and ethics and specifies three possible ways (solving ethical issues in specific contexts, developing normative standards that can be used to regulate and evaluate the behaviors of a group of individuals with particular cognitive abilities or disabilities, and identifying and correcting faulty moral intuitions) neuroscience can contribute to normative discourse of ethics. Among the three models, the author discusses and analyzes constructive integration wherein neuroscience can contribute to the development of a normative standard that refers to a group of individuals under particular psychological conditions. By surveying and analyzing recent studies of neuroscience, specifically neuroimaging studies on cognitive empathy and emotional empathy, the author argues that neuroscience can be integrated with ethics in developing a normative standard for autistic moral agency. The author also argues that, in developing and justifying a normative standard, its psychological relevance should be considered. Since a normative standard relates to a group of individuals, consideration of their cognitive and emotional abilities is critically important. In this regard, integration of neuroscience and ethics can be understood as the theoretical effort to bring neuroscience to the discussion of normative rules and standards that can be practiced by a particular group of individuals.
This volume represents a burgeoning perspective on the origins of psychopathology, one that focuses on the development of the human central nervous system. The contemporary neurodevelopmental perspective assumes that mental disorders result from etiologic factors that alter the normal course of brain development. Defined here in its broadest sense, neurodevelopment is a process that begins at conception and extends throughout the life span. We now know that it is a complex process, and that its course can be altered by a host of factors, ranging from inherited genetic liabilities to psychosocial stressors. This book features the very best thinking in the converging fields of developmental neuroscience and developmental psychopathology. The developmental window represented is broad, extending from the prenatal period through adulthood, and the authors cover a broad range of etiologic factors and a spectrum of clinical disorders. Moreover, the contributors did not hesitate to use the opportunity to hypothesize about underlying mechanisms and to speculate on research directions.
The development of the 'theory of mind hypothesis' altered the autism research field by offering a single underlying cognitive impairment to account for the defining triad of impairments. Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith (1985) suggested that autism was the consequence of a deficit in the development of a theory of mind. This would mean that autistic children failed to develop an understanding that people have minds as well as bodies. Baron-Cohen et al. (1985) demonstrated that most autistic children, and typically developing children under the age of four years, were unable to state a story character's mistaken belief, unlike typically developing children over 4 years who were able to do so. The finding was particularly significant because the theory of mind impairment appeared to be specific to autism, and not explained by intellectual or language ability. False belief tasks developed to investigate autistic children's ability to form mental representations of people's thoughts, feelings and desires, used a pass/fail paradigm which was consistent with the view that theory of mind was an all or none affair. However, inconsistent performance by autistic children across a variety of false belief tasks, and the ability of some autistic children with good verbal ability to pass false belief tasks, challenged the model of an absence of any mentalising ability. Performance on false belief tasks at ceiling by many autistic children with a verbal age above 6 years has stimulated the development of more advanced tasks, scored on a performance scale to assess the extent of mentalising ability rather than its presence or absence. This study matched 20 autistic children between 6-12 years with typically developing children for chronological age, verbal age and IQ. The children's theory of mind ability was assessed on 'standard' false belief and a picture sequencing task, and on three 'advanced' measures: an adapted version of the Strange Stories (Happe, 1994; Happe, unpublished), a children's version of the Eyes task (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997; Baron- Cohen, unpublished) and a new Cartoons task (Happe, unpublished). The autistic group's scores were significantly lower than typically developing children's in accounting for story characters' actions on mentalising stories, but not physical stories. The autistic group used significantly less mental state language in their answers than the typically developing group, with a specific difference in the use of second order phrases. Performance of the two groups was also distinguished by the Eyes task, but not the Cartoons task. Overall, the 'advanced' theory of mind tasks were able to discriminate group membership with 85% accuracy. The use of alternative cognitive strategies to produce appropriate answers to lower level mentalising tasks in a more laborious way than the affective route used by typically developing children may explain these findings. In addition, it may be that these able autistic individuals experience an impairment in the ability to use low level mentalising abilities which they may in fact possess.
Empathy is a complex, multi-dimensional process. As such, it can be impaired at multiple stages, producing disorders of empathy with separable underlying causes. Studies often divide empathy into emotional and cognitive components to simplify the large space of empathic processes. This practice can be helpful, but also causes people to misunderstand their interdependence at the level of the mechanism and how they correspond to surveys and tasks. As a result, inferences made from experimental results are often incorrect and cannot be integrated across studies. We explain how emotional and cognitive empathy overlap through the proximate mechanism and clarify their operationalization in common surveys and tasks. A systematic review of three clinical disorders is used to highlight this issue and reinterpret and unite results according to the proximate framework––Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Aligning constructs through the proximate mechanism allows us to understand both empathy and its disorders.
Background
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit severe and persistent deficits in social behaviors. An area of socialization that develops towards the end of the first year of life is social referencing, wherein infants when confronted with a new or unusual event, look at an adult, and base their subsequent behavior on the facial expression of the adult.
Method
We undertook a systematic review to highlight the existing conceptualizations of social referencing, and study the social referencing repertoire in children with ASD. We searched five databases for studies published until December 2018. Articles included reported behavioral measures of social referencing and were specific to individuals with ASD or those at elevated risk for ASD.
Results
Of the 54 articles meeting eligibility for full-text review, eight met inclusion criteria and the data were synthesized narratively. Deficits in social referencing were reported in seven studies, and data from all studies indicated atypical attention shifts between social and non-social stimuli in children with ASD.
Conclusions
A deficiency exists in spontaneous looking behaviors and possibly in differential responding to affective cues among children with ASD. The variations in the definitions and measurement methods present in the literature call for additional research that examines both referential looking and differential cue responding components within an ambiguous context. Guidelines for future research and clinical implications are discussed.
Introduction: In this paper, we propose to describe a pilot therapeutic experience with a program developed by the team, which we call CONECTA-2, a training plan for social cognition and communication skills for people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Our objective was to establish whether a theoretical-practical therapeutic clinical device, training in executive functions, processes of social cognition and language, can improve the effectiveness of communication in people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Method: Participants were 10 people between 18 and 24 years old, 7 men and 3 women, diagnosed with schizophrenia for less than three years at the time of the program. A prior and subsequent evaluation of emotional attribution and communicative effectiveness was carried out. 24 group sessions were held, training in executive functions, social cognition and pragmatic-communicative skills. Results: Positive changes were verified both in emotional attribution and in the communicative effectiveness of the participants. Conclusions: The results of this pilot experience present a challenge in terms of developing clinical intervention plans that allow rehabilitating those skills to achieve a better adaptation and social insertion of people with schizophrenia.
Introducción:
En el presente trabajo, nos proponemos describir una experiencia terapéutica piloto con un programa desarrollado por el equipo, al que denominamos CONECTA-2, un plan de entrenamiento de cognición social y habilidades comunicativas para personas con diagnóstico de esquizofrenia. Nuestro objetivo fue establecer si un dispositivo clínico terapéutico teórico-práctico, de entrenamiento grupal en funciones ejecutivas, de procesos de cognición social y lenguaje, puede mejorar la eficacia comunicativa en personas con diagnóstico de esquizofrenia.
Método:
Participaron 10 personas entre 18 y 24 años, 7 hombres y 3 mujeres, con diagnóstico de esquizofrenia desde hace menos de tres años al momento de efectuar el taller. Se realizó una evaluación previa y posterior de atribución emocional y eficacia comunicativa. Se realizaron 24 sesiones grupales, de entrenamiento en funciones ejecutivas, cognición social y habilidades pragmático-comunicativas.
Resultados:
Se verificaron cambios positivos tanto en atribución emocional como en la eficacia comunicativa en 9 de los 10 participantes.
Conclusiones:
Los resultados de esta experiencia piloto, nos plantean un desafío en términos de desarrollar planes de intervención clínica, que permitan rehabilitar aquellas habilidades, en pos de lograr una mejor adaptación e inserción social de personas con esquizofrenia.
In this final chapter, autism spectrum disorder is described including prevalence considerations, comorbidities, and diagnostic practices, as well as areas of specific challenge in joint attention and theory of mind. The gold standards for assessment are highlighted, and considerations for interventions are presented guided by the National Standards Project and the National Professional Development Center.
Parents' perceptions of their children's emotional expressiveness, and possible bases for these perceptions, were investigated in a study comparing older, nonretarded autistic and normal children and in another study comparing young autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children. Both groups of autistic children were perceived as showing more negative emotion and less positive emotion than comparison children. In the younger sample, parental perceptions correlated with the children's attention and responsiveness to others' displays of emotion in 2 laboratory situations. Findings contradict the view that autism involves the "absence of emotional reaction" (American Psychiatric Association, 1987, p. 35).
Background Recent advances in computer vision and wearable technology have created an opportunity to introduce mobile therapy systems for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) that can respond to the increasing demand for therapeutic interventions; however, feasibility questions must be answered first.
Objective We studied the feasibility of a prototype therapeutic tool for children with ASD using Google Glass, examining whether children with ASD would wear such a device, if providing the emotion classification will improve emotion recognition, and how emotion recognition differs between ASD participants and neurotypical controls (NC).
Methods We ran a controlled laboratory experiment with 43 children: 23 with ASD and 20 NC. Children identified static facial images on a computer screen with one of 7 emotions in 3 successive batches: the first with no information about emotion provided to the child, the second with the correct classification from the Glass labeling the emotion, and the third again without emotion information. We then trained a logistic regression classifier on the emotion confusion matrices generated by the two information-free batches to predict ASD versus NC.
Results All 43 children were comfortable wearing the Glass. ASD and NC participants who completed the computer task with Glass providing audible emotion labeling (n = 33) showed increased accuracies in emotion labeling, and the logistic regression classifier achieved an accuracy of 72.7%. Further analysis suggests that the ability to recognize surprise, fear, and neutrality may distinguish ASD cases from NC.
Conclusion This feasibility study supports the utility of a wearable device for social affective learning in ASD children and demonstrates subtle differences in how ASD and NC children perform on an emotion recognition task.
Fifteen children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) (mean age 12.7 years) were compared to mental age matched normal children on matching a context to its appropriate emotion. PDD children were slightly but significantly impaired on this task relative to a non-social task equated for difficulty. Both matching tasks were highly correlated with cognitive variables; the social matching task alone was correlated with social skill level, and neither task was correlated with ratings of social deviance. Results are discussed in terms of the demands of social cognitive tasks, the magnitude of social cognitive findings, control group selection and individual differences.
Disturbances in the development of joint attention behaviors and the ability to share affect with others are two important components of the social deficits of young autistic children. We examined the association of shared positive affect during two different communicative contexts, joint attention and requesting. The pattern for the normal children was one of frequent positive affect displayed toward the adult during joint attention situations. Compared to the normal children, the autistic children failed to display high levels of positive affect during joint attention whereas the mentally retarded children displayed high levels of positive affect during requesting as well as joint attention situations. These results lend support to the hypothesis that the joint attention deficits in autistic children also are associated with a disturbance in affective sharing.
This study examined autistic children's social behavior, affect, and use of gaze during naturalistic interactions with their mothers. Sixteen autistic children, 30 to 70 months of age, and 16 normal children, matched on receptive language, participated. Children and their mothers were videotaped during three situations: a free-play period, a more structured period during which communicative demand was made on the child, and a face-to-face interaction. In all three situations, autistic and normal children did not differ in the frequency or duration of gaze at mother's face. In the one condition (face-to-face interaction) during which affective expressions were coded, autistic and normal children also were not found to differ significantly in the frequency or duration of smiles displayed, and neither group displayed frowns. However, autistic children were much less likely than normal children to combine their smiles with eye contact in a single act that conveyed communicative intent. Autistic and normal children were not found to differ in the percentages of smiles they displayed to social versus nonsocial events. However, when autistic children's responses to mother's smiles specifically were examined, it was found that they were much less likely to smile in response to mother's smiles than were normal children. Finally, it was found that mothers of autistic children displayed fewer smiles and were less likely to smile in response to their children's smiles, when compared with mothers of normal children. These findings suggest that the autistic child's unusual affective behavior may negatively affect the behavior of others.
This paper continues our earlier investigation of autistic children's deficit in attributing beliefs to others--in their "theory of mind." Three experiments are reported. The first tests the prediction that autistic children will fail to distinguish mental and physical entities. The second tests the prediction that they will also be unaware of the mental function of the brain. The third tests the prediction that they will be unable to take into account their own mental states. This latter prediction was tested using Appearance-Reality (A-R) tasks. All three predictions were supported. Deficits in these areas were not found among mentally handicapped or normal children of the same or lower mental and chronological age, suggesting that they may be autism-specific and independent of general developmental delay. It is argued that autistic children's failure to make A-R distinctions is consistent with Leslie's (1987) metarepresentation theory of autism.
We use a new model of metarepresentational development to predict a cognitive deficit which could explain a crucial component of the social impairment in childhood autism. One of the manifestations of a basic metarepresentational capacity is a ‘theory of mind’. We have reason to believe that autistic children lack such a ‘theory’. If this were so, then they would be unable to impute beliefs to others and to predict their behaviour. This hypothesis was tested using Wimmer and Perner's puppet play paradigm. Normal children and those with Down's syndrome were used as controls for a group of autistic children. Even though the mental age of the autistic children was higher than that of the controls, they alone failed to impute beliefs to others. Thus the dysfunction we have postulated and demonstrated is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism.RésuméLes auteurs présentent un nouveau mod`éle de développement méta-cognitif pour prédire le déficit cognitif qui rendrait compte d'un composant essentiel du handicap social de l'enfant autiste. Une des manifestations d'une capacité de base méta-cognitive est une ‘theorie de l'esprit'. Nous avons des raisons de croire que cette théorie fait defaut chez l'enfant autiste. Celui-ci serait done incapable d'attribuer des croyances aux autres ou de prédire leur comportement. Cette hypothèse a été testée avec le paradigme de jeu des marionettes utilisé par Wimmer et Perner. Des enfants normaux et des enfants avec trisomie 21 ont servi de groupe contrôle. Bien que Page mental des enfants autistes ait été plus élevé que deux du groupe contrôle, seuls les enfants autistes Wont pu attribuer aux autres des croyances. Ainsi le dysfonctionnement prévu a pu être démontre, il s'avère indépendant du retard mental et spécifique a l'autiste.
In this study we establish that autistic children have severe and specific difficulty with understanding mental states. Even with a mental age of 7 years, these children mostly fail in tasks which are normally passed around age 3 and 4. We confirm previous results on the poor understanding of false belief but also find that autistic children's grasp of the notion of limited knowledge is grossly delayed. We rule out various other explanations for these results and further show that the autistic child's performance is not limited by failure to understand the causal notion of seeing. Likewise, memory failure cannot be blamed. Language delay can be ruled out as a cause of failure since a group of children with specific language impairment, matched for verbal mental age, performed at ceiling. We propose that autistic children are specifically impaired in their meta-representational capacity and that this impedes their construction of a ‘theory of mind’.
In previous studies we have found that autistic children were severely impaired in conceptual role taking, that is, in their theory of mind. In this study we consider two possible precursors to this impairment, both of which are early interpersonal abilities. The first is perceptual role taking. A test of this revealed no impairment, ruling it out as related to the impairment in theory of mind. The second is pointing. This was shown to be abnormal, both in comprehension and production, relative to non-autistic controls. In particular, protodeclarative pointing was impaired whilst protoimperative pointing was not. The possibility that impaired protodeclarative pointing may be a precursor to autistic children's impaired theory of mind is discussed.
There were two purposes underlying this study: to describe the sensorimotor functioning of mute autistic children and to relate their sensorimotor performance to nonverbal communication. Twelve mute children, diagnosed autistic, ranging from 4 years 9 months to 12 years of age, were administered four scales of sensorimotor development from the Uzgiris and Hunt (1975) series: object permanence, gestural imitation, means for obtaining environmental events, and causality. Subjects performed most poorly on the imitation scale with 9 of 12 performing below Piaget's fifth sensorimotor stage. In contrast, performance was highest on the object permanence scale: No child scored below Stage V. Regarding the subjects' non-scales and Stage III on the imitation scale appeared to form minimal prerequisites for intentional communication in a variety of situations. Finally, none of the subjects, even those with relatively complete sensorimotor development, spontaneously used what Bates (1976) has called "protodeclarative" gestures to point out or show objects to adults. The absence of protodeclarative gestures may represent a qualitatively distinct pattern of prelinguistic development in certain autistic children.
Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that young autistic children are selectively impaired on emotion perception tasks. Results supporting the hypothesis were found on two of the four measures when the controls used were matched on non-verbal mental age; performance on the other tasks was consistent with global deficits across affective and non-affective domains, rather than specific deficits in emotion perception. When the autistic group was compared with controls matched on verbal mental age, no group differences were found. These results suggest that emotion perception impairment is not likely to be the primary underlying deficit in autism. Additional areas for further investigation were suggested.
Autistic children, pair matched on chronological and verbal mental age with control children, were given Hobson's task of recognition of emotions and Baron-Cohen's False Belief tasks to assess the replicability of their findings of deficits in understanding of feeling and mental states in autism. There were no group differences on the emotion tasks and performance was related to chronological and verbal mental age. An autism specific deficit was shown in only one of the false belief conditions and again performance was related to verbal comprehension ability. There was some consistency within the group in responses across the two kinds of tasks. Parent reported social behaviour and experience in the autistic children was only weakly related to the ability to pass the tasks. It is argued that the results reflect developmental factors and that claims for an autism specific problem in these kinds of social/cognitive processing may need further exploration.
Expression of emotion was examined in a group of 10 preschool‐aged autistic children and a control group of 10 developmentally delayed children matched for chronological and mental age. Each child was videotaped for 15 minutes of interaction with the mother, a child psychiatrist, and the nursery school teacher. Affective expression was recorded using a behavior checklist. The autistic children were found to display less positive affect that the delayed children (p < 0.01). In addition, the positive affect displayed by the autistic children was less likely to be partner‐related and more likely to be related to self‐absorbed activity than was the case with the delayed children (p < 0.001). The groups were not found to differ in the frequency of negative affect.
In previous tests of the lowest level of a "theory of mind" (i.e. first-order belief attribution), 80% of autistic children were found to be impaired relative to a non-autistic mentally-handicapped control group. The present study examines the 20% of autistic children who have a theory of mind at the lowest level, and tests their ability to use a theory of mind at higher levels (i.e. second-order belief attribution). This autistic subgroup, in comparison to Down's Syndrome and normal control groups, was found to be severely impaired at the higher level. Autism is discussed as a possible case of specific developmental delay.
High-functioning autistic adults were compared with normal adults using a battery of tests devised to assess the recognition and expression of emotional cues in both facial and vocal modalities. The autistic subjects were relatively impaired in both the appreciation and production of emotional expressions. Although no one test provided a clear-cut separation of the groups at the individual level, composite scores did separate the groups quite well. It is suggested that this battery of tasks may have some value in family genetic studies of autism that need to identify subclinical deficits that might be aetiologically linked with autism.
Piagetian sensorimotor functioning of 10 autistic, 10 retarded, and 10 normal children, closely matched on mental age, was assessed with the Dunst revision of the Uzgiris and Hunt scales of infant psychological development. The three groups showed no significant differences in overall performance or specific subtest performance as revealed by estimated developmental ages, number of failed items, and Piagetian stage levels. These findings, which are contrary to previous reports of early sensorimotor deficits specific to autism, suggest that the long-term cognitive deficits in autism are more in symbolic thinking, which does not emerge until the end of the sensorimotor period.
26 autistic children with mental ages of 3-13 years were tested on 3 tasks that are within the capability of 3- or 4-year-old normal children. The first task tested understanding of a mistaken belief. Children were shown a typical box of a certain brand of sweets, and they all thought that it contained that kind of sweet. To their surprise, however, the box contained something else. Yet, only 4 out of the 26 autistic children were able to anticipate that another child in the same situation would make the same mistake. In contrast, all but 1 of 12 children with specific language impairment, matched for mental age, understood that others would be as misled as they had been themselves. The autistic children were also tested for their ability to infer knowledge about the content of a container from having or not having looked inside. All 4 children who had passed the belief task and an additional 4 performed perfectly, but most failed. The third task assessed children's pragmatic ability to adjust their answers to provide new rather than repeat old information. Here, too, most autistic children seemed unable to reliably make the correct adjustment. These results confirm the hypothesis that autistic children have profound difficulty in taking account of mental states.
This study examined the facial affect expressions of autistic, mentally retarded and normal children. Affect was coded using the Maximally Discriminative Movement Coding System. Results indicated that the autistic children were more flat/neutral in their affect expression than the mentally retarded children. Moreover, they displayed a variety of ambiguous expressions not displayed by any of the other children. This unique pattern may be related to the difficulties that autistic children have in sharing affect, and to the difficulties that others experience in reading their affective signals.
This research extends previous research regarding the intellectual functioning of autistic individuals on standardized measures of intelligence (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised). In Study I 33 individuals with autism who closely fit the DSM-III criteria were studied. Clear evidence was found that differentiates these individuals' verbal intellectual processes from their visual-motor intellectual abilities. Principal components analysis was used to examine the interrelationship among the various intellectual abilities which such tests of intelligence measure. In Study II the intellectual abilities of a group of autistic 8- to 12-year-olds were compared to age-matched groups of children with receptive developmental language disorder, dysthymic disorder, or oppositional disorder. The intellectual abilities of autistic children were significantly different from the other groups of children.
The WISC-R factor scores of non-retarded children meeting DSM III criteria for autism and schizophrenia were compared. The scores of the schizophrenic children on factor 3 were significantly lower than those of the autistic children, below the range of normal children, and significantly lower than the scores they obtained on the verbal comprehension and perceptual organization factors. The autistic children scored in the superior range on the block design subtest and did not show gross impairments in language function as indexed by scores on the verbal comprehension factor. The only subtest autistic children were impaired on was the comprehension subtest.
Groups of MA-matched autistic, normal and non-autistic retarded children were tested for their ability to choose drawn and photographed facial expressions of emotion to "go with" a person videotaped in gestures, vocalizations and contexts indicative of four emotional states. Although both autistic and control subjects were adept in choosing drawings of non-personal objects to correspond with videotaped cues, the autistic children were markedly impaired in selecting the appropriate faces for the videotaped expressions and contexts. Within the autistic group, the children's performance in this task of emotion recognition was related to MA. It is suggested that autistic children have difficulty in recognizing how different expressions of particular emotions are associated with each other, and that this might contribute to their failure to understand the emotional states of other people.
Autistic and matched non-autistic retarded children were selected for their ability to recognize the correspondence between schematic drawings and videotaped scenes involving people. The subjects of both groups were able to choose schematic drawings of gestures for a person's gestures of emotion enacted on videotape. However, the autistic children were significantly impaired in choosing which of the drawings of gestures should 'go with' videotaped vocalizations and facial expressions characteristic of four emotional states. The results were found to be consistent with results from a previous, related study in which the same subjects had chosen drawn or photographed faces to indicate their judgements of the same videotapes of emotional expression. It is suggested that these findings reflect an important aspect of autistic children's social disability.
Nine highly verbal, nonretarded men, ages 18 to 39, with clearly documented childhood diagnoses of infantile autism were studied with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, a measure of conceptual problem solving sensitive to frontal system dysfunction, and with a measure of social-adaptive functioning. Their performances were compared with 10 controls matched for age, sex, education, and IQ, as well as with published norms for various groups of brain-damaged patients. Significant deficits in the formulation of rules and significant perseverative tendencies were documented in the autistic sample. No significant correlation between these deficits and social-adaptive deficits was seen. These findings were discussed with respect to the heterogeneity of the autistic disorder and Damasio's hypothesis concerning frontal-subcortical dysfunction in autism.
An individual's social competence is often considered in terms of his role-taking abilities. In the light of studies by Piaget, it has been supposed that a child's developing capacity to appreciate the viewpoints of others in a social context is reflected in his ability to recognize points of view in a visuospatial setting. If this is valid, then visuospatial role-taking tasks may afford a measure of some relatively "cognitive" component of the capacity to engage in social behavior. Tasks in which subjects were required to make judgments about different and yet related views of a three-dimensional scene or object, together with tests of operational thinking, were presented to normal children and to subjects with the diagnosis of infantile autism. The results indicate that autistic children are not more impaired in their recognition of visuospatial perspectives than are normal children of comparable intellectual level in tests of operational thinking. A further, more limited study yielded suggestive evidence that over this series of tasks, autistic children perform as well as subjects with Down's syndrome who have a similar verbal mental age. These findings render it improbable that autistic children are especially "egocentric" in their appreciation of visuospatial perspectives.
The objectives of this study were to examine the level of sensorimotor concepts of young autistic children and to relate these concepts to language comprehension. A sample of 16 autistic children with a mean mental age of 24.8 months was administered a standardized scale of sensorimotor intelligence and of receptive language. The autistic children demonstrated surprisingly sophisticated sensorimotor skills, particularly object permanence. While their initial performance was inferior to that of normal controls matched on mental age, particularly in their use of objects in combination, the difference between groups diminished on the second test administration. On the receptive language measure, the autistic children were less able to identify words correctly. The sensorimotor behavior of autistic children who demonstrated language comprehension did not differ from those who showed no language comprehension, except that the former group tended to use an object as an instrument somewhat more frequently. The fact that the autistic children were so impaired in language even with fairly good sensorimotor skills suggests that these skills, particularly object permanence, play a minor role in their language acquisition.