Autistic and Non-autistic Children's Recounting of Basic and Self-Conscious Emotional Experiences.
Autistic kids match peers on basic emotion stories but need extra help to include social context when talking about guilt or embarrassment.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Davidson et al. (2025) asked autistic and non-autistic children to tell short stories about times they felt happy, sad, guilty, or embarrassed.
The team then counted how many details each child gave and whether they mentioned other people’s thoughts or feelings.
What they found
Both groups talked about basic emotions like happy or sad in the same rich way.
When the emotion was guilt or embarrassment, autistic children told shorter stories and rarely said what others were thinking or feeling.
How this fits with other research
Davidson et al. (2017) saw a similar gap in adults: those with autism traits reported less guilt and pride in daily life.
Seiverling et al. (2012) and Goddard et al. (2014) also found that autistic children and adults give fewer specific autobiographical details, so the new child data line up with older adult work.
Sturmey et al. (2010) showed autistic kids use “we” like peers but look less at faces; the 2025 study adds that they also leave faces and minds out of their guilt stories.
Why it matters
When you teach social skills, do not assume a child who can name happy or sad also understands guilt or embarrassment.
Prompt with questions like “What did your friend think?” or “How did your teacher feel?” to fill in the missing social layer.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →After a social mishap, ask the child to tell the story again while you scaffold: “Who else was there? What might they have thought?”
02At a glance
03Original abstract
PURPOSE: In the present study, we asked autistic and non-autistic children to recount personally experienced basic (fear, happiness, sadness) and self-conscious (guilt, pride, embarrassment) emotions. Using linguistic analyses, children's recounts were examined in order to gain new insights into their understanding of these emotions. METHODS: Children were asked to recount personally experienced basic and self-conscious emotions. Discourse and content analyses were performed on their responses. RESULTS: For basic emotions, autistic and non-autistic children's recounts did not differ in terms of number of responses provided following two requests, length of responses (i.e., number of verb and argument clauses in recounts), and the number of prompts needed to elicit basic emotion recounts. Moreover, children did not differ in the appropriateness of their recounts of basic emotions, although autistic children made fewer causal inferences about sadness than their non-autistic peers. In contrast, autistic children offered significantly fewer recounts of guilt and embarrassment and provided briefer recounts of guilt compared to their non-autistic peers. Autistic children also made fewer references to others in their recounts for guilt and embarrassment and were less likely to include social context information (i.e. references to others). Finally, autism symptomatology predicted appropriateness of content for guilt and pride, whereas vocabulary level predicted appropriateness of content for sadness and embarrassment. CONCLUSION: Few linguistic differences were found in children's recounting of basic emotions, whereas autistic children showed less appropriate content for self-conscious emotions. Implications of our findings in terms of possible avenues for intervention and training are given.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s10802-017-0351-0