Physiological responses to social and nonsocial stimuli in neurotypical adults with high and low levels of autistic traits: implications for understanding nonsocial drive in autism spectrum disorders.
In neurotypical adults, higher autistic traits go with stronger body arousal to objects than to faces.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked neurotypical adults to view pictures. Some pictures showed faces. Others showed objects like trains or clocks.
While the adults looked, the team measured tiny changes in skin sweat. Higher sweat means the body is more alert or excited.
What they found
Adults who scored high on the Autism Quotient got more sweaty when they saw objects than when they saw faces.
In plain words, stronger autism traits in everyday adults link to bigger body reactions to things, not people.
How this fits with other research
Zadok et al. (2024) pooled many studies and saw no overall heart-rate difference between autistic and neurotypical groups during social tasks. The new study does not clash with that finding. Ester looked at diagnosed autism and mixed tasks; J et al. looked at trait level and pure pictures.
Tassé et al. (2013) used the same trait scale one year earlier. They found high-trait students had weaker live social skills. The 2014 paper adds a body measure, showing the trait also shows up in sweat response.
Lundin et al. (2019) checked if the short 10-item Autism Quotient works in large surveys. Their work supports the full scale used here, giving us confidence the trait split is sound.
Why it matters
If a client avoids eye contact but lights up at trains, the reason may be lower social drive, not defiance. You can test this quickly: show two photos, one face and one favorite object, and note skin-sweat or heart-rate with a cheap watch sensor. A jump for the object hints the social channel is not rewarding. Use that data to pick reinforcers: start with object play, then pair it with people.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Researchers have suggested that the two primary cognitive features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a drive toward nonsocial processing and a reduced drive toward social processing, may be unrelated to each other in the neurotypical (NT) population and may therefore require separate explanations. Drive toward types of processing may be related to physiological arousal to categories of stimuli, such as social (e.g., faces) or nonsocial (e.g., trains). This study investigated how autistic traits in an NT population might relate to differences in physiological responses to nonsocial compared with social stimuli. NT participants were recruited to examine these differences in those with high vs. low degrees of ASD traits. Forty-six participants (21 male, 25 female) completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) to measure ASD traits before viewing a series of 24 images while skin conductance response (SCR) was recorded. Images included six nonsocial, six social, six face-like cartoons, and six nonsocial (relating to participants' personal interests). Analysis revealed that those with a higher AQ had significantly greater SCR arousal to nonsocial stimuli than those with a low AQ, and the higher the AQ, the greater the difference between SCR arousal to nonsocial and social stimuli. This is the first study to identify the relationship between AQ and physiological response to nonsocial stimuli, and a relationship between physiological response to both social and nonsocial stimuli, suggesting that physiological response may underlie the atypical drive toward nonsocial processing seen in ASD, and that at the physiological level at least the social and nonsocial in ASD may be related to one another.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2014 · doi:10.1002/aur.1422