Reduced differentiation of emotion-associated bodily sensations in autism.
Autistic kids feel most emotions in the same body spots, which may explain their higher anxiety rates.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked 8- to young learners to color where they feel six emotions in the body.
Half the kids had autism, half did not. Each child filled out a body map after hearing stories like 'You just got a great gift' or 'You lost your toy.'
The team then compared how different the colored areas were across emotions for each child.
What they found
Autistic kids used almost the same body areas for every emotion. Non-autistic kids showed clear shifts—anger in the fists, joy in the chest, fear in the stomach.
The overlap was not tied to poor interoception; both groups felt their heartbeat equally well.
How this fits with other research
Burrows et al. (2018) already showed autistic children make fewer and shorter facial expressions. The new study adds that the body map underneath those faces is also flatter.
Adams et al. (2020) found a large share of autistic children self-report anxiety. Thomas et al. (2021) gives a possible reason: if happy and sad feel the same in the body, emotions are harder to label and manage.
Chen et al. (2020) linked higher autistic traits to suicidality through anxiety and depression. The undifferentiated body maps may be an early marker on that pathway.
Why it matters
When a child says 'My tummy hurts' every day, you can now ask, 'What were you doing right before?' If the answer is always different, the child may be lumping many feelings into one bodily signal. Teaching simple body-emotion matching games could sharpen their emotional vocabulary and lower later anxiety risk.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
More research has been conducted on how autistic people understand and interpret other people's emotions, than on how autistic people experience their own emotions. The experience of emotion is important however, because it can relate to difficulties like anxiety and depression, which are common in autism. In neurotypical adults and children, different emotions have been associated with unique maps of activity patterns in the body. Whether these maps of emotion are comparable in autism is currently unknown. Here, we asked 100 children and adolescents, 45 of whom were autistic, to color in outlines of the body to indicate how they experienced seven emotions. Autistic adults and children sometimes report differences in how they experience their internal bodily states, termed interoception, and so we also investigated how this related to the bodily maps of emotion. In this study, the autistic children and adolescents had comparable interoception to the non-autistic children and adolescents, but there was less variability in their maps of emotion. In other words, they showed more similar patterns of activity across the different emotions. This was not related to interoception, however. This work suggests that there are differences in how autistic people experience emotion that are not explained by differences in interoception. In neurotypical people, less variability in emotional experiences is linked to anxiety and depression, and future work should seek to understand if this is a contributing factor to the increased prevalence of these difficulties in autism.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2021 · doi:10.1177/1362361320987950