Verbal marking of affect by children with Asperger Syndrome and high functioning autism during spontaneous interactions with family members.
High-functioning autistic kids can talk about emotions if you ask, but they rarely start the talk or notice others’ feelings on their own.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Eve and her team watched kids with Asperger or high-functioning autism talk with their own families at home. They counted every time a child said how someone felt or why they felt that way.
The researchers compared these counts to the same kids’ typical brothers and sisters.
What they found
The kids with autism explained emotions correctly when asked, even more than their siblings. But they almost never started a chat about feelings and rarely commented on other people’s emotions.
When they did talk about feelings, they used happy, sad, or angry words just as well as the other kids.
How this fits with other research
Baker et al. (2010) seems to disagree. They gave kids headphones and asked them to pick the emotion in a voice. The autism group did as well as typical kids, showing no spoken-emotion gap. The tasks explain the clash: Eve watched free family talk; F used a short lab test.
Lecavalier et al. (2006) backs up the gap. They showed faces and voices in a lab and found kids with Asperger scored lower at naming the emotions. Reading faces and tones in tests is harder than labeling feelings in your own words at home.
Korpilahti et al. (2007) looked deeper. They measured brain waves while kids listened to emotional voices. The autism group had odd right-brain responses, hinting that hidden wiring issues may sit under the calm surface seen in Eve’s home chats.
Why it matters
You can trust that high-functioning clients know emotion words, but don’t wait for them to bring feelings up. Build in daily prompts like “How do you think Mom feels?” and use visual emotion cards during natural routines. Pair these prompts with short prosody drills from Pirjo et al. to bridge any hidden tone-deaf spots.
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Add one scripted question each session: “How does that person feel?” right after a shared activity.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Verbal marking of affect by older children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and high functioning autism (HFA) during spontaneous interactions is described. Discourse analysis of AS and HFA and typically developing children included frequency of affective utterances, affective initiations, affective labels and affective explanations, attribution of affective responses to self and others, and positive and negative markers of affect. Findings indicate that children with AS and HFA engaged in a higher proportion of affect marking and provided a higher proportion of affective explanations than typically developing children, yet were less likely to initiate affect marking sequences or talk about the affective responses of others. No significant differences were found between groups in terms of the marking of positive and negative affect.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2006 · doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0146-6