Language and Emotion

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Kapitel 3.1 Emotion Recognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder:

While it is accepted that individuals with ASD have emotion recognition deficits, prior studies have presented conflicted findings. On the one hand, studies have reported that children with ASD are as capable as typically developing individuals at recognising basic emotions (Castelli, 2005). Castelli’s (2005) study found that children with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) are as capable as typically developing children at recognising facial expressions depicting the six basic emotions. The study involved assessing participants abilities to match standardised photographic images of facial expressions, depicting various emotions at different intensity levels, to an appropriate emotion label. The emotions consisted of happiness, anger, surprise, disgust, fear, and sadness. It is worth noting that the vast majority of studies investigating emotion recognition using individuals with ASD have focused on the six basic emotions. Thus, future research studies should incorporate simple emotions alongside more complex states to determine performance abilities during emotion recognition tasks. Referring back to Castelli’s (2005) study, there are some limitations which must be considered. Firstly, two different assessments were used to calculate the verbal mental ages of the children with autism and the control group. Thus, the methodological procedures used in the study are not consistent. This can be exemplified through the children with autism or Asperger Syndrome being administered the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – Third Edition (1992), eliciting verbal intelligent quotient (IQ) and performance IQ scores. By contrast, the control group consisted of typically developing children whose scores were obtained using the British Picture Vocabulary Scale – Second Edition (BPVS-II, 1997). The study may have been more insightful if more complex emotions were included as emotion recognition deficits seem to be more apparent when high-functioning individuals with ASD are assessed on their ability to recognise more complex emotions (Heaton et al., 2012).
On the other hand, studies have found that children with ASD do not perform as well as their typically developing peers during emotion recognition tasks (Losh and Capps, 2003; Loukusa et al., 2014; Taylor et al., 2015). Emotional understanding was explored in Losh and Capps’ (2003) study, and they reported that children with autism or Asperger’s syndrome (AS) performed significantly worse than their typically developing peers during tasks. This was measured through participants being assessed on their ability to provide appropriate definitions for a range of simple, complex, and complex, self-conscious emotions. In addition to this, participants were assessed on their emotional understanding abilities through having to match emotion words to a series of video clips depicting the following emotions: happiness, fear, anger, shame, and sadness. Adults with ASD have also been found to perform significantly worse compared to a typically developing cohort when they were assessed on their ability to match non-verbal and verbal vocalisations expressing six basic emotions to an appropriate emotion word (Heaton et al., 2012). Examples of non-verbal vocalisations included were laughing, used to express happiness, and crying sounds which depict sadness. Interestingly, the severity of symptoms of alexithymia was strongly associated with the recognition of external emotion cues in individuals with ASD (Heaton et al., 2012, p. 2547). Alexithymia is a term used to refer to the difficulties a person has in being able to identify and describe their feelings and emotional states as well as communicate these to other people (Ricciardi et al., 2015; Poquérusse et al., 2018). Difficulties in being able to distinguish between feelings and bodily sensations of emotional arousal are also a feature associated with alexithymia (Taylor et al., 1991), as well as externally orientated thinking and a limited imaginative capacity (Ricciardi et al., 2015). There is a high prevalence of alexithymia co-occurring with ASD as it has been estimated that half the number of individuals diagnosed with ASD also have alexithymia (Poquérusse et al., 2018, p. 1196). Narrative styles have also been found to be impoverished in individuals with alexithymia, most notably in the ability to use figurative language and metaphors (Poquérusse et al., 2018). Similarly, prior studies have found that children with ASD have difficulty in understanding figurative language (MacKay and Shaw, 2004). To clarify, figurative language is defined as the use of words which deviate from the literal, semantic meaning to convey a message. Some examples of figurative language include similes, metaphors, idioms, hyperbole, and onomatopoeia. It’s raining cats and dogs is an idiom used to describe extremely heavy rainfall, and the listener must be familiar with this meaning to arrive at the correct interpretation of a speaker’s utterance.