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Emotional Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Effects of Age, Emotional Valence, and Social Engagement on Emotional Language Use

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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.

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Notes

  1. Studies on internal state language use in ASD using story-narratives are few at present, and mixed findings have been reported, with some reporting reduced frequency and diversity of internal state language used by children with ASD compared to control groups (Rumpf et al. 2012; Siller et al. 2014), and others reporting no significant difference between groups (Canfield et al. 2016; Capps et al. 2000; Kristen et al. 2015). However, it is beyond the scope of the present study to discuss findings on internal state language, as they do not clearly examine emotional language skills.

  2. Some of the participants with ASD, and all the typically developing participants, were likely to be from bilingual homes and/or learning a second language in school. In mainstream primary schools in Singapore, all subjects are taught in English, except for the Mother Tongue subject, which is in Mandarin Chinese, Malay or Tamil. However, students with special educational needs, such as children with ASD, are sometimes exempt from the Mother Tongue requirement upon request by parents and approval by the Ministry of Education.

  3. We did not statistically control for language and theory-of-mind skills by entering them as covariates in our analyses because the assumption of equal values of the covariates in all participant groups is not met in this sample (Schneider et al. 2015).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all children and parents who participated in this study. We are also grateful to all participating schools and the Ministry of Education of Singapore, for their kind support of this research. Lastly, we thank our research assistants, Oh Jing Jing, Lee Jia Wen, Tan Lin Er and Joy Teo. This paper is based on part of a doctoral study completed by E. J. Teh, under the supervision of S. J. Rickard Liow and M. J. Yap, and portions of this paper were previously presented at the National Psychology Graduate Students Conference 2017, Singapore, and the International Society for Autism Research Conference 2018, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The study was partially supported by research grants from the Singapore Children’s Society and the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, National University of Singapore.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, 7 Arts Link, #04-05, Block AS5, Singapore, 117570, Singapore

    Elizabeth J. Teh & Melvin J. Yap

  2. Department of Otolaryngology, National University of Singapore, MD 3, Level 2, 16 Medical Drive, Singapore, 117600, Singapore

    Susan J. Rickard Liow

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  1. Elizabeth J. Teh
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  2. Melvin J. Yap
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  3. Susan J. Rickard Liow
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Contributions

All authors conceptualized and designed the study. EJT coordinated the collection of the data, performed the statistical analyses, and drafted the manuscript; MJY and SJRL provided feedback on the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Elizabeth J. Teh.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from parents of all individual child participants included in the study, and verbal consent was obtained from all individual child participants included in the study.

Appendix

Appendix

List of Stimulus Pictures

See Table 5.

Table 5 The picture numbers below refer to numbering in the PiSCES Database (Teh et al. 2017)
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Teh, E.J., Yap, M.J. & Rickard Liow, S.J. Emotional Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Effects of Age, Emotional Valence, and Social Engagement on Emotional Language Use. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 4138–4154 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3659-x

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