Abstract
People with autism are often characterized as having difficulties with theory of mind abilities such as emotion recognition. However, rather than being a pervasive deficit of ‘mindblindness,’ a number of studies suggests these difficulties vary by context, and when people with autism mindread non-human agents, such as animals or cartoons, these abilities improve. To replicate this effect, 15 adolescents with both autism and intellectual disability participated in a test of facial emotion recognition, with both human and animal faces. Participants performed significantly better on the animal version of the assessment compared to the human version, and human rather than animal scores were the strongest predictor of symptom severity. These results were shown to be primarily driven by improvement in recognition of the emotions happiness and anger in animal rather than human faces. Implications with regards to social motivation and theory of mind interventions are discussed.
Highlights
Theory of mind (ToM), known as mindreading, refers to the ability to both infer and predict thoughts and emotions in other people by using contextual and interpersonal cues, such as recognizing changes in facial expressions (Premack and Woodruff 1978)
The present study explores whether individuals with autism, who are characterized as low functioning, show improved ToM towards non-human or anthropomorphic agents compared to typically human agents
Participants’ Gillian Asperger Diagnostic Scale (GADS) scores proved to be a much greater indicator of emotion recognition abilities for human rather than animal faces, though both were significantly predictive. Previous research on this topic shows that autistic individuals with mean IQ scores in the average range have improved ToM ability when social agents are non-human rather than human (Atherton and Cross 2018)
Summary
Theory of mind (ToM), known as mindreading, refers to the ability to both infer and predict thoughts and emotions in other people by using contextual and interpersonal cues, such as recognizing changes in facial expressions (Premack and Woodruff 1978). Sucksmith et al (2013) looked at differences in facial emotion recognition performance using the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces test (KDEF) (Lundqvist et al 1998) between adults with ASD, parents of a child with ASD, and unaffected members of the general population They found that only participants with ASD showed difficulty identifying emotions, the emotions happy, angry and afraid. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (2019) 49:4482–4487 the majority of research into autism relies on a high functioning sample with average IQ scores, due to a need for matched control groups (Ozonoff et al 1990) It is unclear clear whether people with autism who have more severe functional impairments show improved ToM when agents are non-human. The present study explores whether individuals with autism, who are characterized as low functioning, show improved ToM towards non-human or anthropomorphic agents compared to typically human agents
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