Emotional understanding, cooperation, and social behavior in high-functioning children with autism.
High-functioning autistic kids can cooperate, but still need targeted help reading faces and smoothing odd mannerisms.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Andrew and colleagues watched 40 high-functioning kids with autism play games with a partner.
They compared them to kids with ADHD and typical kids of the same age.
The games tested sharing, helping, and reading facial expressions.
What they found
The autistic kids shared and helped just as much as the other groups.
They could explain feelings in words, but they missed subtle face cues.
They also talked and moved in ways that looked odd to peers.
How this fits with other research
Smith et al. (2010) later showed these kids still lag on theory-of-mind tasks, so the cooperation success may mask deeper gaps.
O’Connor et al. (2020) proved you can train emotion recognition with stimulus-equivalence drills, giving us a fix for the face-cue problem.
Hou et al. (2023) found younger autistic kids also miss joint-intention cues, showing the odd mannerisms start early and stay.
Wichnick-Gillis et al. (2019) used script fading to cut odd social lines, proving the mannerism piece can be shaped too.
Why it matters
You can build social-skills goals knowing cooperation is reachable, but don’t skip emotion recognition and odd-behavior targets.
Try short equivalence drills for faces and script fading for quirky greetings.
Pair the two in one session: five emotion cards, then a scripted hello with a peer.
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Join Free →Run a 5-trial emotion-ID match, then have the learner greet a peer using a 3-word script you fade across trials.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
In contrast to typically developing children, children with autism rarely exhibit cooperative social behavior. To examine whether this problem reflects global developmental delays or autism-specific deficits, the present study compared cooperation, emotional understanding, personality characteristics, and social behavior of 10 children with autism who had average IQ to those of 16 children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and 10 typically developing children. In cooperative behavior, level of emotional understanding, and aloof behavior, the autism group outperformed the ADHD/ODD group and did not differ significantly from typically developing children. However, the autism group showed worse emotion recognition and more active-but-odd behavior than the other groups. The results indicate that high-functioning children with autism can develop cooperative social behavior and advanced theory of mind abilities, but continue to show deficits in identifying emotions and displaying socially appropriate behavior.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2004 · doi:10.1007/s10803-004-5284-0