Beyond expectations: autism, understanding embarrassment, and the relationship with theory of mind.
High-functioning autistic learners can spot embarrassment, but you still need to teach them how to explain and calibrate it.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hillier et al. (2002) asked high-functioning autistic adults to rate how embarrassing short stories were.
They also had to explain why each scene was or was not embarrassing.
The team then compared these answers to a non-autistic group and looked at theory-of-mind scores.
What they found
The autistic group picked the same embarrassment ratings as the control group.
Yet they struggled to give clear reasons and often missed when a scene was not embarrassing.
Better theory-of-mind scores went hand in hand with better explanations.
How this fits with other research
Hillier et al. (2002) is a direct replication of the same team’s mixed-result study from the same year. Both show that embarrassment is not completely lost in autism, but explaining it is shaky.
Capio et al. (2013) extends this idea. They found autistic adults felt normal vicarious embarrassment for accidents, but much less when a faux pas was done on purpose. This supports the link between mentalizing and embarrassment.
Adler et al. (2015) adds a twist: autistic adults over-estimate how embarrassed others feel. Together the three papers paint a clear picture—recognition can look intact, yet accuracy and justification remain targets for teaching.
Why it matters
Your clients may already sense that a spilled drink is awkward, but they might not explain why, and they may misread intentional jokes as equally cringe-worthy.
Use theory-of-mind drills that contrast accidental versus intentional acts, then ask clients to rate and justify the embarrassment level.
This small shift gives them the language to navigate social repair and reduces anxiety from false alarms.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The ability of high-functioning individuals with autism to understand the complex emotion of embarrassment, and how this relates to an understanding of theory of mind, was investigated. Scenarios involving embarrassing and non-embarrassing situations were presented to a group with autism and three comparison groups. Participants were required to rate the level of embarrassment felt by the protagonist and to justify their choices. The results indicated that those with autism generally gave similar ratings of embarrassment as the comparison groups, but did show significant difficulty with non-embarrassing scenarios, and in providing appropriate justifications for embarrassment. In addition, a significant relationship between scores from false belief tasks and justification scores was found, supporting the proposed link between theory of mind skills and understanding embarrassment. Participants with autism did, however, show a higher than expected understanding of this complex emotion.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2002 · doi:10.1177/1362361302006003007