Abstract
This study investigated whether individuals with high autistic traits rely on psychoacoustic abilities in affective prosody recognition (APR). In 94 college students, Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and psychoacoustic abilities were measured. Results indicated that higher AQ, higher rapid auditory processing (RAP), and maleness were associated with a lower APR accuracy for low-intensity prosodies. There was a strong positive association between RAP and APR for participants with high AQ, whereas low-AQ participants showed no such pattern. The findings suggest a reliance on psychoacoustic abilities as compensatory mechanism for deficits in higher-order processing of emotional signals in social interactions, and imply potential benefits of auditory interventions in improving APR among individuals with high autistic traits.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baron-Cohen, S., & Wheelwright, S. (2004). The empathy quotient: An investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high functioning autism, and normal sex differences. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(2), 163–175. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JADD.0000022607.19833.00
Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Skinner, R., Martin, J., & Clubley, E. (2001). The autism-spectrum quotient (AQ): Evidence from asperger syndrome/high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31(1), 5–17.
Baum, K. M., & Nowicki, S., Jr. (1998). Perception of emotion: Measuring decoding accuracy of adult prosodic cues varying in intensity. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 22(2), 89–107. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022954014365
Bonnel, A., Mottron, L., Peretz, I., Trudel, M., Gallun, E., & Bonnel, A. M. (2003). Enhanced pitch sensitivity in individuals with autism: A signal detection analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(2), 226–235. https://doi.org/10.1162/089892903321208169
Chan, S. D. (2007). Character and word list for Hong Kong primary education. Hong Kong Education Bureau.
Demopoulos, C., Hopkins, J., Kopald, B. E., Paulson, K., Doyle, L., Andrews, W. E., & Lewine, J. D. (2015). Deficits in auditory processing contribute to impairments in vocal affect recognition in autism spectrum disorders: A MEG Study. Neuropsychology, 29(6), 895–908. https://doi.org/10.1037/neu0000209
Globerson, E., Amir, N., Kishon-Rabin, L., & Golan, O. (2014). Prosody recognition in adults with high functioning autism spectrum disorders: From psychoacoustics to cognition. Autism Research, 8(2), 153–163. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1432
Grossman, R. B., Bemis, R. H., Skwerer, D. P., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2010). Lexical and affective prosody in children with high-functioning autism. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 53(3), 778–793. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2009/08-0127)
Grossman, R. B., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2012). “Who said that?” matching of low- and high-intensity emotional prosody to facial expressions by adolescents with ASD. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42(12), 2546–2557. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1511-2
Halberstadt, A. G., Denham, S. A., & Dunsmore, J. C. (2001). Affective social competence. Social Development, 10(1), 79–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9507.00150
Hamann, S., & Canli, T. (2004). Individual differences in emotion processing. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 14(2), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2004.03.010
Hayes, A. F. (2021). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis. The Guilford Press.
Heaton, P. (2005). Interval and contour processing in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 35(6), 787–793. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-005-0024-7
Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. The American Journal of Psychology, 57(2), 243–259. https://doi.org/10.2307/1416950
Hong Kong Psychological Society. (2014). The Wechsler adult intelligence scale–fourth edition (Hong Kong). Hong Kong Psychological Society.
Jones, C. R., Pickles, A., Falcaro, M., Marsden, A. J., Happé, F., Scott, S. K., Sauter, D., Tregay, J., Phillips, R. J., Baird, G., Simonoff, E., & Charman, T. (2011). A multimodal approach to emotion recognition ability in autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 52(3), 275–285. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02328.x
Kargas, N., López, B., Reddy, V., & Morris, P. (2015). The relationship between auditory processing and restricted, repetitive behaviors in adults with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 45(3), 658–668. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2219-2
Landry, O., & Chouinard, P. A. (2016). Why we should study the broader autism phenotype in typically developing populations. Journal of Cognition and Development, 17(4), 584–595.
Lerner, M. D., McPartland, J. C., & Morris, J. P. (2013). Multimodal emotion processing in autism spectrum disorders: An event-related potential study. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 3, 11–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2012.08.005
Levitt, H. C. C. H. (1971). Transformed up-down methods in psychoacoustics. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 49(2B), 467–477. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1912375
Lindner, J. L., & Rosén, L. A. (2006). Decoding of emotion through facial expression, prosody and verbal content in children and adolescents with Asperger’s syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(6), 769–777. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-006-0105-2
Lord, C., Rutter, M., DiLavore, P., Risi, S., Gotham, K., & Bishop, S. (2012). Autism diagnostic observation schedule—2nd edition (ADOS-2). Western Psychological Corporation.
Lyons, M., Schoen Simmons, E., & Paul, R. (2014). Prosodic development in middle childhood and adolescence in high-functioning autism. Autism Research, 7(2), 181–196. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1355
Marshall, C. M., Snowling, M. J., & Bailey, P. J. (2001). Rapid auditory processing and phonological ability in normal readers and readers with dyslexia. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44(4), 925–940. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2001/073)
Paulmann, S., & Uskul, A. K. (2014). Cross-cultural emotional prosody recognition: Evidence from Chinese and British listeners. Cognition and Emotion, 28(2), 230–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2013.812033
Radloff, L. S. (1977). The CES-D scale: A self-report depression scale for research in the general population. Applied Psychological Measurement, 1(3), 385–401. https://doi.org/10.1177/014662167700100306
Rothman, A. D., & Nowicki, S., Jr. (2004). A measure of the ability to identify emotion in children’s tone of voice. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 28(2), 67–92. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JONB.0000023653.13943.31
Russ, J. B., Gur, R. C., & Bilker, W. B. (2008). Validation of affective and neutral sentence content for prosodic testing. Behavior Research Methods, 40(4), 935–939. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.40.4.935
Schirmer, A., Lui, M., Maess, B., Escoffier, N., Chan, M., & Penney, T. B. (2006). Task and sex modulate the brain response to emotional incongruity in Asian listeners. Emotion, 6(3), 406–417. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.6.3.406
Schirmer, A., Striano, T., & Friederici, A. D. (2005). Sex differences in the preattentive processing of vocal emotional expressions. NeuroReport, 16(6), 635–639.
Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., Williams, J. B., & Löwe, B. (2006). A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: The GAD-7. Archives of Internal Medicine, 166(10), 1092–1097. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.166.10.1092
Stewart, M., McAdam, C., Ota, M., Peppé, S., & Cleland, J. (2013). Emotional recognition in autism spectrum conditions from voices and faces. Autism, 17(1), 6–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361311424572
van den Brink, D., Van Berkum, J., Bastiaansen, M., Tesink, C., Kos, M., Buitelaar, J., & Hagoort, P. (2012). Empathy matters: ERP evidence for inter-individual differences in social language processing. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(2), 173–183. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsq094
Wiethoff, S., Wildgruber, D., Kreifelts, B., Becker, H., Herbert, C., Grodd, W., & Ethofer, T. (2008). Cerebral processing of emotional prosody—influence of acoustic parameters and arousal. NeuroImage, 39(2), 885–893. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.09.028
Funding
This study was funded by Hong Kong Research Grants Committee (Grant No. 12604418) to Ming Lui.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
ML was responsible for the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection were performed by GKBL. GKBL, ML, YMYH and KCPY contributed to the participant recruitment. Data analyses were conducted by GKBL. ML and WS commented on the data analyses and data presentation. ML and GKBL contributed to the writing of the first draft of the manuscript. WS edited and commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lui, M., Lau, G.K.B., Han, Y.M.Y. et al. Strong Relationship Between Rapid Auditory Processing and Affective Prosody Recognition Among Adults with High Autistic Traits. J Autism Dev Disord 53, 3180–3193 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05600-4
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05600-4