Emotional Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Effects of Age, Emotional Valence, and Social Engagement on Emotional Language Use.
Autistic kids say fewer feeling words when they talk about pictures, especially sad or low-social scenes.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked the kids to describe pictures. Half had autism, half were typical. Ages ranged from 6 to 14.
Each photo showed happy, sad, or neutral scenes. Some had people, some did not. Kids talked for one minute per picture.
What they found
Autistic kids used fewer feeling words overall. The gap was biggest for sad pictures and pictures without people.
Older autistic kids did slightly better, but still lagged behind. Girls with autism used more feeling words than boys with autism.
How this fits with other research
Baixauli et al. (2016) pooled 24 studies and found the same story: autistic kids struggle with internal-state language. Sasson et al. (2018) now shows this holds true even in quick picture talks, not just long stories.
Kauschke et al. (2016) also saw girls outperform boys on affect words, but both sexes still trailed typical peers. The new data line up perfectly.
Llanes et al. (2020) moved the test to handwritten personal stories and found the same weakness. Emotional language deficits show up everywhere—speech, writing, pictures, stories.
Why it matters
If you run language assessments, count feeling words, not just nouns and verbs. Low numbers flag a target for intervention. When you teach emotional vocabulary, start with sad and non-social scenes—the hardest spots. Add extra practice for boys who may need it most.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficits in reporting others' emotions (Lartseva et al. in Front Hum Neurosci 8:991, 2015) and in deriving meaning in social contexts (Klin et al. in Handbook of autism and pervasive developmental disorders, Wiley, Hoboken, 2005). However, researchers often use stimuli that conflate salient emotional and social information. Using a matched-pairs design, the impact of emotional and social information on emotional language in pre-school and school-age children, with and without ASD, was assessed with a picture description task comprising rated stimuli from the Pictures with Social Contexts and Emotional Scenes database (Teh et al. in Behav Res Methods, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0947-x , 2017). Results showed both groups with ASD produced fewer emotional terms than typically developing children, but the effects were moderated by valence, social engagement, and age. Implications for theory and clinical practice are discussed.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2018 · doi:10.1007/s10803-018-3659-x