Abstract
Social cognition, social skill, and social motivation have been extensively researched and characterized as atypical in autistic people, with the assumption that each mechanistically contributes to the broader social interaction difficulties that diagnostically define the condition. Despite this assumption, research has not directly assessed whether or how these three social domains contribute to actual real-world social interaction outcomes for autistic people. The current study administered standardized measures of social cognition, social skill, and social motivation to 67 autistic and 58 non-autistic (NA) adults and assessed whether performance on these measures, both individually and relationally between dyadic partners, predicted outcomes for autistic and NA adults interacting with unfamiliar autistic and NA partners in a 5 minute unstructured “get to know you” conversation. Consistent with previous research, autistic adults scored lower than NA adults on the three social domains and were evaluated less favorably by their conversation partners. However, links between autistic adults' performance on the three social domains and their social interaction outcomes were minimal and, contrary to prediction, only the social abilities of NA adults predicted some interaction outcomes within mixed diagnostic dyads. Collectively, results suggest that reduced performance by autistic adults on standardized measures of social cognition, social skill, and social motivation do not correspond in clear and predictable ways with their real-world social interaction outcomes. They also highlight the need for the development and validation of more ecological assessments of autistic social abilities and the consideration of relational dynamics, not just individual characteristics, when assessing social disability in autism.
Highlights
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is clinically defined in part by “persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction” (APA, 2013)
Means and standard deviations for social cognitive tasks, social motivation, and social skills can be viewed in Tables 2, 3 [those for outcome measures appear in Morrison et al, 2020]
NA adults scored higher than autistic adults on the Benton [F(1, 177) = 26.37, p < 0.001], TASIT [F(1, 117) = 14.98, p < 0.001], FMS [F(1, 117) = 12.46, p = 0.001], social cognition composite score [F(1, 117) = 26.02, p < 0.001], overall social skills ratings [F(1, 123) = 31.49, p < 0.001], but diagnostic groups did not differ on the ER-40 [F(1, 117) = 2.79, p = 0.10]
Summary
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is clinically defined in part by “persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction” (APA, 2013). They score lower on tasks assessing face recognition (e.g., Klin et al, 1999; Joseph and Tanaka, 2003), the identification of emotion from facial expressions, voices, and social scenes (e.g., Golan et al, 2007; Kennedy and Adolphs, 2012; Uljarevic and Hamilton, 2013; Sasson et al, 2016), and the inference of other peoples’ intentions and mental states (e.g., Spek et al, 2010; Mathersul et al, 2013) These difficulties are presumed to mechanistically relate to the poor social and functional outcomes autistic adults often experience (Sasson et al, 2011), the surprisingly small number of studies that have empirically tested this assumption tend to find only modest relationships (Klin et al, 2002; Lerner and Mikami, 2012; Bishop-Fitzpatrick et al, 2014; Hanley et al, 2014; Deschrijver et al, 2016; Sasson et al, 2020), and no studies to our knowledge have tested whether individual social cognitive performance demonstrates meaningful associations to real-world social interaction for autistic adults. Given that social cognition is often targeted for improvement in psychosocial interventions as a means for enhancing social interaction, the lack of evidence in this regard reflects a significant oversight
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