Empathy and Cognition in High-Functioning Children with Autism

Yirmiya, Nurit; Sigman, Marian D.; Kasari, Connie; Mundy, Peter

doi:10.2307/1130909

Cited by 230 publications

(67 citation statements)

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“…Although individuals on the autistic spectrum may not show deficits in basic emotion recognition (Loveland et al, 1997; Grossman et al, 2000), they do have deficits in recognizing complex emotions (Yirmiya et al, 1992; Baron-Cohen et al, 2001). The use of a graded developmental scale of emotion comprehension may help reveal such deficits in clinical populations, should they exist, and enable researchers to quantify the degree of developmental delay in emotion lexicon comprehension relative to typical age-matched controls.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion Word Comprehension from 4 to 16 Years Old: A Developmental Survey

Baron‐Cohen¹,

Golan²,

Wheelwright³

et al. 2010

Front. Evol. Neurosci.

107

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Background: Whilst previous studies have examined comprehension of the emotional lexicon at different ages in typically developing children, no survey has been conducted looking at this across different ages from childhood to adolescence. Purpose: To report how the emotion lexicon grows with age. Method: Comprehension of 336 emotion words was tested in n = 377 children and adolescents, aged 4–16 years old, divided into 6 age-bands. Parents or teachers of children under 12, or adolescents themselves, were asked to indicate which words they knew the meaning of. Results: Between 4 and 11 years old, the size of the emotional lexicon doubled every 2 years, but between 12 and 16 years old, developmental rate of growth of the emotional lexicon leveled off. This survey also allows emotion words to be ordered in terms of difficulty. Conclusions: Studies using emotion terms in English need to be developmentally sensitive, since during childhood there is considerable change. The absence of change after adolescence may be an artifact of the words included in this study. This normative developmental data-set for emotion vocabulary comprehension may be useful when testing for delays in this ability, as might arise for environmental or neurodevelopmental reasons.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion Word Comprehension from 4 to 16 Years Old: A Developmental Survey

Baron‐Cohen¹,

Golan²,

Wheelwright³

et al. 2010

Front. Evol. Neurosci.

107

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thus social-emotional difficulties in ASD may not arise because of a lack of motivation per se but because of a lack of understanding what emotional signals afford. Support for this argument stems from the studies by Sigman and Kasari and colleagues outlined earlier in which autistic children were consistently less responsive to the emotional displays of others (Loveland and Tunali, 1991; Sigman et al, 1992; Yirmiya et al, 1992) despite demonstrating an awareness of the emotional displays in question (Bacon et al, 1998; Corona et al, 1998). The behavioral self regulation view is also in line with studies that demonstrate typical physiological but atypical behavioral separation anxiety in autistic children (Willemsen-Swinkels et al, 2000; Sigman et al, 2003) and more generally it helps to explain why studies of emotion perception tend to yield less consistent behavioral differences between ASD and non-ASD groups than studies examining the ability to use such expressions to regulate interpersonal exchanges.…”

Section: The Social-emotional Difficulties Associated With Asdmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…For instance, it is fairly consistently reported that autistic individuals are less likely than non-autistic individuals to direct emotional expressions at others during naturalistic interactions (Snow et al, 1987; Macdonald et al, 1989; Mundy and Sigman, 1989; Yirmiya et al, 1989; Dawson et al, 1990; Kasari et al, 1990, 1993; Sigman et al, 1992; Dissanayake et al, 1996; Charman et al, 1997; Joseph and Tager-Flusberg, 1997; Bieberich and Morgan, 1998; Zwaigenbaum et al, 2005; Hobson et al, 2009; Hudenko et al, 2009). Autistic individuals also tend to mimic the facial expressions of others less frequently and consistently than non-autistic individuals (McIntosh et al, 2006; Beall et al, 2008; Stel et al, 2008; Oberman et al, 2009; but, see Magnée et al, 2007; see also Sims et al, 2012) and they share the emotional experiences of others in a qualitatively different manner than comparison groups (Yirmiya et al, 1992; Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, 2004; Lombardo et al, 2007; Rogers et al, 2007; Dziobek et al, 2008; Hobson et al, 2009; Hurdy and Slaughter, 2009; Minio-Paluello et al, 2009a; Bird et al, 2010; Greimel et al, 2010; Schulte-Rüther et al, 2011; Schwenck et al, 2011; see also the discussion between Minio-Paluello et al, 2009b; Smith, 2009). Although findings in this context are not always consistent (see Begeer et al, 2008), the weight of the evidence overall leaves little doubt that ASD is characterized by anomalies in multiple facets of interpersonal affective behaviors, and the real life consequences of these have been documented in a series of elegant naturalistic observations by Sigman and Kasari and their colleagues (Sigman et al, 1992; Dissanayake et al, 1996; Corona et al, 1998; see also Loveland and Tunali, 1991; Bacon et al, 1998; see also Hobson et al, 2009).…”

Section: The Social-emotional Difficulties Associated With Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interplay between Emotion and Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Implications for Developmental Theory

Gaigg

2012

Front. Integr. Neurosci.

116

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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is clinically defined by abnormalities in reciprocal social and communicative behaviors and an inflexible adherence to routinised patterns of thought and behavior. Laboratory studies repeatedly demonstrate that autistic individuals experience difficulties in recognizing and understanding the emotional expressions of others and naturalistic observations show that they use such expressions infrequently and inappropriately to regulate social exchanges. Dominant theories attribute this facet of the ASD phenotype to abnormalities in a social brain network that mediates social-motivational and social-cognitive processes such as face processing, mental state understanding, and empathy. Such theories imply that only emotion related processes relevant to social cognition are compromised in ASD but accumulating evidence suggests that the disorder may be characterized by more widespread anomalies in the domain of emotions. In this review I summarize the relevant literature and argue that the social-emotional characteristics of ASD may be better understood in terms of a disruption in the domain-general interplay between emotion and cognition. More specifically I will suggest that ASD is the developmental consequence of early emerging anomalies in how emotional responses to the environment modulate a wide range of cognitive processes including those that are relevant to navigating the social world.

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“…Research focused on emotional dysfunctions and theoretical accounts have emphasized the notion that the mechanisms mediating the self-regulation of behavior during social–emotional exchanges are severely impaired in ASDs (Yirmiya et al, 1992; Hobson, 1993). Pioneer studies reported that difficulties in children with ASDs might arise with both basic emotions (fear, disgust, anger) and social cognitive emotions (pride, embarrassment, shame) that are related to introspection and self-reflection (Capps et al, 1995; Loveland et al, 1997; Kasari et al, 2001; Heerey et al, 2003).…”

Section: The Relevance Detector Theory Of Autismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The amygdala and the relevance detection theory of autism: an evolutionary perspective

Zalla

Sperduti

2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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In the last few decades there has been increasing interest in the role of the amygdala in psychiatric disorders and, in particular, in its contribution to the socio-emotional impairments in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Given that the amygdala is a component structure of the “social brain,” several theoretical explanations compatible with amygdala dysfunction have been proposed to account for socio-emotional impairments in ASDs, including abnormal eye contact, gaze monitoring, face processing, mental state understanding, and empathy. Nevertheless, many theoretical accounts, based on the Amygdala Theory of Autism, fail to elucidate the complex pattern of impairments observed in this population, which extends beyond the social domain. As posited by the Relevance Detector theory (Sander et al., 2003), the human amygdala is a critical component of a brain circuit involved in the appraisal of self-relevant events that include, but are not restricted to, social stimuli. Here, we propose that the behavioral and social–emotional features of ASDs may be better understood in terms of a disruption in a “Relevance Detector Network” affecting the processing of stimuli that are relevant for the organism’s self-regulating functions. In the present review, we will first summarize the main literature supporting the involvement of the amygdala in socio-emotional disturbances in ASDs. Next, we will present a revised version of the Amygdala Relevance Detector hypothesis and we will show that this theoretical framework can provide a better understanding of the heterogeneity of the impairments and symptomatology of ASDs. Finally, we will discuss some predictions of our model, and suggest new directions in the investigation of the role of the amygdala within the more generally disrupted cortical connectivity framework as a model of neural organization of the autistic brain.

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Empathy and Cognition in High-Functioning Children with Autism

Cited by 230 publications

References 0 publications

Emotion Word Comprehension from 4 to 16 Years Old: A Developmental Survey

Emotion Word Comprehension from 4 to 16 Years Old: A Developmental Survey

The Interplay between Emotion and Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Implications for Developmental Theory

The amygdala and the relevance detection theory of autism: an evolutionary perspective

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