Social and delay discounting in autism spectrum disorder.
Autistic teens and adults act as if delayed or social rewards are worth less, but early studies show you can soften this by adding tasks during waits and using familiar people as reinforcers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Warnell et al. (2019) asked autistic and neurotypical teens and adults to choose between small rewards now or bigger rewards later.
They also chose between rewards for themselves or smaller rewards for another person.
The team compared how steeply each group lowered, or discounted, the value of waiting or sharing.
What they found
Autistic participants took the quick, smaller option more often.
They also kept more for themselves when sharing was an option.
In plain words, they acted as if future and social rewards were worth less.
How this fits with other research
The result lines up with three earlier studies. Faja et al. (2015) and Leezenbaum et al. (2019) saw the same steep discounting in younger kids using wait tasks instead of money.
Fox et al. (2001) showed that giving kids a simple task during the wait helps them pick the larger later prize, pointing to a practical fix.
Goldberg et al. (2016) seems to disagree: they found autistic kids valued playing with a parent just as much as typical kids. The gap closes when you notice Goldberg used a real parent, while Rice used a hypothetical stranger. Familiar social partners may stay valuable even when novel ones are discounted.
Why it matters
Your client may bolt when the payoff is far away or benefits someone else. Break big goals into smaller, sooner pay-offs and insert quick tasks during waits. When social praise feels weak, pair it with tangible items first, then fade. Finally, use familiar staff for social rewards before asking clients to share with new people.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Current literature is divided over whether and how processes such as perspective taking and reward sensitivity differ between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) versus neurotypical individuals. Discounting tasks may provide novel insight into how these processes operate. In delay discounting tasks, participants choose between smaller immediate rewards and larger delayed rewards, and in social discounting tasks, participants choose between a smaller monetary rewards for themselves versus a larger reward for partners of varied social distance (e.g., a close friend vs. an acquaintance). Delay and social discounting tasks thus implicitly measure the subjective value of rewards given to one's future self and to others, capturing constructs such as perspective taking, reward processing, and social closeness, all of which have been discussed as core cognitive mechanisms underlying ASD. Despite extensive research on discounting in other clinical populations, few studies have examined delay discounting in ASD and no research has examined social discounting in ASD. The goal of the current study was to assess delay and social discounting for monetary rewards in a single sample of adolescents and adults with ASD compared to a matched neurotypical sample. Overall, adults and adolescents with ASD valued both future rewards and rewards given to others less than their typical counterparts did, but rates of discounting were not significantly correlated across temporal and social domains. These results extend an important behavioral paradigm for understanding both perspective taking and reward processing to autism. Autism Res 2019, 12: 870-877. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Discounting tasks-which experimentally measure the subjective value of different rewards-have been used with a variety of clinical populations, but are underexplored in ASD. We found that compared to neurotypical individuals, individuals with ASD showed diminished subjective value for future rewards (compared to immediate rewards) and rewards for others (compared to rewards for self). This finding has implications for understanding perspective taking, reward processing, and social closeness in ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2019 · doi:10.1002/aur.2085