Abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) demonstrate increased visual attention and elevated brain reward circuitry responses to images related to circumscribed interests (CI), suggesting that a heightened affective response to CI may underlie their disproportionate salience and reward value in ASD. To determine if individuals with ASD differ from typically developing (TD) adults in their subjective emotional experience of CI object images, non-CI object images and social images, 213 TD adults and 56 adults with ASD provided arousal ratings (sensation of being energized varying along a dimension from calm to excited) and valence ratings (emotionality varying along dimension of approach to withdrawal) for a series of 114 images derived from previous research on CI. The groups did not differ on arousal ratings for any image type, but ASD adults provided higher valence ratings than TD adults for CI-related images, and lower valence ratings for social images. Even after co-varying the effects of sex, the ASD group, but not the TD group, gave higher valence ratings to CI images than social images. These findings provide additional evidence that ASD is characterized by a preference for certain categories of non-social objects and a reduced preference for social stimuli, and support the dissemination of this image set for examining aspects of the circumscribed interest phenotype in ASD.
Highlights
Circumscribed interests (CI) are a characteristic of autism listed within the restricted and repetitive behavior domain [1] defined by an intense preoccupation with a narrow range of subjects
Post hoc paired-samples t-tests revealed that High Autism Interest (HAI) images were rated significantly higher on arousal than both Low Autism Interest (LAI) images (t (268) = 18.63, p,.001) and social images (t (268) = 9.38, p,.001), and social images were rated significantly higher than LAI objects (t (268) = 7.26, p,.001)
A significant interaction emerged between group and image type (F (1.69, 447.08) = 14.37, p,.001, eta squared = .05; see Figure 3) that was driven by the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) group providing higher valence ratings for HAI images (t (267) = 3.23, p = .01) and lower ratings for social images (t (267) = 3.33, p = .001) than the typically developing (TD) group, while the two groups did not differ on ratings of LAI objects (p = .78)
Summary
Circumscribed interests (CI) are a characteristic of autism listed within the restricted and repetitive behavior domain [1] defined by an intense preoccupation with a narrow range of subjects. Given prior findings suggesting attention capture by ‘‘High Autism Interest’’ (HAI) objects related to CI in ASD [18] [19] but decreased visual attention to social stimuli [29] [34], we predicted relatively higher valence ratings of HAI images but lower valence ratings of social images by ASD relative to typically-developing (TD) adults, while the groups would not differ on valence ratings for ‘‘Low Autism Interest’’ LAI images (i.e., object images unrelated to CI) Such a result would indicate that HAI objects are more pleasing to individuals with ASD relative to other object types, while social stimuli are less pleasing. A secondary exploratory aim was pursued to determine if a valence preference for HAI objects over SI images increased with the presence of autism-related characteristics, both within ASD and within a typically developing comparison sample Such a finding would suggest that higher levels of autism-related traits, even at subclinical levels in unaffected typically developing populations, is associated with a disproportionate emotional preference of objects related to CI relative to social stimuli
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