Reading the mind in the voice: a study with normal adults and adults with Asperger syndrome and high functioning autism.
Adults with AS/HFA struggle to read mental states from voice alone, so add audio-only tests to your assessment kit.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wimpory et al. (2002) built a new test. People listen to short voice clips. They pick the speaker's mental state from four choices.
The team tested adults with Asperger or high-functioning autism. They also tested typical adults. Everyone did the voice task.
What they found
The autism group scored lower. They missed subtle hints in tone of voice. Typical adults found the task easy.
The gap shows a clear theory-of-mind weakness when only voice cues are given.
How this fits with other research
Kaland et al. (2008) later gave similar tasks to youth. Kids with AS/HFA also scored low. The adult pattern holds across age groups.
Fullana et al. (2007) seems to disagree. They saw typical emotion scores in children labeled Asperger. The key difference is diagnosis rules. A et al. split AS from HFA, while D et al. blended them. When groups are split, only HFA shows the voice deficit.
Cohrs et al. (2017) broke ToM into parts. They found social-cognitive and social-perceptual gaps in the same adults. The voice task fits the perceptual slice.
Why it matters
If you assess adults with ASD, do not rely on face-to-face chat alone. Add an audio-only test to catch hidden mind-reading problems. Use clear, high-intensity vocal cues for clients with HFA. Keep AS and HFA labels separate in your report; mixing them can hide who needs help.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
People with high functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger syndrome (AS) have deficits in theory of mind (ToM). Traditional ToM tasks are not sensitive enough to measure ToM deficits in adults, so more subtle ToM tests are needed. One adult level test, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test has shown that AS and HFA subjects have measurable deficits in the ability to make ToM inferences. Here we introduce a test that extends the above task into the auditory domain and that can be used with adults with IQ Scores in the normal range. We report the use of the test with an adult sample of people with AS/HFA and with two adult control groups. Results suggest that individuals with AS/HFA have difficulty extracting mental state information from vocalizations. These results are consistent with previous results suggesting that people with HFA and AS have difficulties drawing ToM inferences.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2002 · doi:10.1023/a:1015497629971