Emotion-related and abstract concepts in autistic people: evidence from the British Picture Vocabulary Scale.
Autistic clients often know big abstract words yet still lag on emotion terms, so check both areas.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers gave autistic adolescents and young adults the British Picture Vocabulary Scale. They compared scores on emotion words with scores on other abstract words. A control group took the same test.
What they found
The autistic group scored lower only on the emotion items. Their scores on other abstract words matched the controls. The gap was specific to feeling words like "worried" or "proud."]},{
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How this fits with other research
Tavassoli et al. (2012) and Bang et al. (2013) saw the same gap in kids’ stories and everyday chat. They found fewer feeling words when autistic children talked about memories or personal events.
Perry et al. (2024) looks like a contradiction. They found no group difference in quick, hidden emotion tasks. The key difference is task type: hidden priming versus naming a picture. Vocabulary tests ask for clear labels, so they still catch the gap.
Freeman et al. (2015) adds that verbal skills can plateau in autism. A flat curve may keep emotion vocabulary behind other words for years.
Why it matters
When you use the BPVS to pick goals, do not assume equal vocabulary across topics. Probe emotion words separately. Add extra teaching sets for feeling labels before working on inference or empathy tasks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autistic and nonautistic retarded adolescents and young adults, individually matched for chronological age and performance on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS; Dunn, Dunn, & Whetton, 1982), were compared on those items of the BPVS that independent raters judged (a) emotion-related and (b) highly abstract. Compared to control subjects, autistic individuals scored lower on emotion-related vis-à-vis emotion-unrelated items, an effect that could not be attributed to the "social content" of the items. However, autistic and nonautistic subjects achieved similar scores when responding to highly abstract vis-à-vis "concrete" words of the BPVS. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have specific impairments in grasping emotion-related concepts. They also suggest the need for further study of autistic and nonautistic retarded subjects' difficulties in abstracting. The results have a bearing on the interpretation of the BPVS and on the use of this test as a matching procedure.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1989 · doi:10.1007/BF02212860