Understanding of emotional experience in autism: Insights from the personal accounts of high-functioning children with autism.

In this study, the authors investigate emotional understanding in autism through a discourse analytic framework to provide a window into children's strategies for interpreting emotional versus nonemotional encounters and consider the implications for the mechanisms underlying emotional understanding in typical development. Accounts were analyzed for thematic content and discourse structure. Whereas high-functioning children with autism were able to discuss contextually appropriate accounts of simple emotions, their strategies for interpreting all types of emotional (but not nonemotional) experiences differed from those used by typically developing children. High-functioning children with autism were less inclined to organize their emotional accounts in personalized causal-explanatory frameworks and displayed a tendency to describe visually salient elements of experiences seldom observed among comparison children. Findings suggest that children with autism possess less coherent representations of emotional experiences and use alternative strategies for interpreting emotionally evocative encounters. Discussion focuses on the significance of these findings for informing the nature of emotional dysfunction in autism as well as implications for theories of emotional understanding in typical development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Making Sense of Self-Conscious Emotion: Linking Theory of Mind and Emotion in Children With Autism.

Self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment and shame are associated with 2 aspects of theory of mind (ToM): (a) the ability to understand that behavior has social consequences in the eyes of others and (b) an understanding of social norms violations. The present study aimed to link ToM with the recognition of self-conscious emotion. Children with and without autism identified facial expressions conscious of self-conscious and non-self-conscious emotions from photographs. ToM was also measured. Children with autism performed more poorly than comparison children at identifying self-conscious emotions, though they did not differ in the recognition of non-self-conscious emotions. When ToM ability was statistically controlled, group differences in the recognition of self-conscious emotion disappeared. Discussion focused on the links between ToM and self-conscious emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intact and impaired mechanisms of action understanding in autism.

Typically developing children understand and predict others' behavior by extracting and processing relevant information such as the logic of their actions within the situational constraints and the intentions conveyed by their gaze direction and emotional expressions. Children with autism have difficulties understanding and predicting others' actions. With the use of eye tracking and behavioral measures, we investigated action understanding mechanisms used by 18 children with autism and a well-matched group of 18 typically developing children. Results showed that children with autism (a) consider situational constraints in order to understand the logic of an agent's action and (b) show typical usage of the agent's emotional expressions to infer his or her intentions. We found (c) subtle atypicalities in the way children with autism respond to an agent's direct gaze and (d) marked impairments in their ability to attend to and interpret referential cues such as a head turn for understanding an agent's intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trajectories of emotional well-being in mothers of adolescents and adults with autism.

Raising an adolescent or adult child with a developmental disability confers exceptional caregiving challenges on parents. We examined trajectories of 2 indicators of emotional well-being (depressive symptoms and anxiety) in a sample of primarily Caucasian mothers (N = 379; M age = 51.22 years at Time 1) of adolescent and adult children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD; M age = 21.91 years at Time 1, 73.2% male). We also investigated within-person associations of child context time-varying covariates (autism symptoms, behavior problems, residential status) and maternal context time-varying covariates (social support network size and stressful family events) with the trajectories of emotional well-being. Data were collected on 5 occasions across a 10-year period. Average patterns of stable (depressive symptoms) and improved (anxiety) emotional well-being were evident, and well-being trajectories were sensitive to fluctuations in both child and maternal context variables. On occasions when behavior problems were higher, depressive symptoms and anxiety were higher. On occasions after which the grown child moved out of the family home, anxiety was lower. Anxiety was higher on occasions when social support networks were smaller and when more stressful life events were experienced. These results have implications for midlife and aging families of children with an ASD and those who provide services to these families. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural affordances and emotional experience: Socially engaging and disengaging emotions in Japan and the United States.

The authors hypothesized that whereas Japanese culture encourages socially engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt), North American culture fosters socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride and anger). In two cross-cultural studies, the authors measured engaging and disengaging emotions repeatedly over different social situations and found support for this hypothesis. As predicted, Japanese showed a pervasive tendency to reportedly experience engaging emotions more strongly than they experienced disengaging emotions, but Americans showed a reversed tendency. Moreover, as also predicted, Japanese subjective well-being (i.e., the experience of general positive feelings) was more closely associated with the experience of engaging positive emotions than with that of disengaging emotions. Americans tended to show the reversed pattern. The established cultural differences in the patterns of emotion suggest the consistent and systematic cultural shaping of emotion over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Understanding emotional transitions: The interpersonal consequences of changing emotions in negotiations.

Research on the interpersonal functions of emotions has focused primarily on steady-state emotion rather than on emotional transitions, the movement between emotion states. The authors examined the influence of emotional transitions on social interactions and found that emotional transitions led to consistently different outcomes than their corresponding steady-state emotions. Across 2 computer-mediated negotiations and a face-to-face negotiation, participants negotiating with partners who displayed a “becoming angry” (happy to angry) emotional transition accepted worse negotiation outcomes yet formed better relational impressions of their partners than participants negotiating with partners who displayed steady-state anger. This relationship was mediated through 2 mechanisms: attributional and emotional contagion processes. The “becoming happy” (angry to happy) emotional transition as compared with steady-state happiness was not significantly related to differences in negotiation outcomes but was significantly related to differences in relational impressions, where perceivers of the “becoming happy” emotional transition gave their partners lower relational impression ratings than perceivers of steady-state happiness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Communication of emotional intent by facial expression.

An experiment to: (a) ascertain the extent to which college students (expressors) can convey to other students (judges) via facial expressions alone, their emotional intent and (b) determine some correlates of this enactment ability. 50 expressors portrayed 10 emotions to 4 judges. Results: (a) The expressors were all able to enact recognizably at levels better than chance, but there were considerable individual differences in this ability. (b) Happiness, love, fear, and determination were more often accurately recognized than disgust, contempt, and suffering. (c) For these enactments, the Woodworth-Schlosberg scale was found to contain 5 rather than 6 categories and was not circular. (d) Contrary to expectation, no personality correlates of enactment ability were found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A new mode of fear expression: Perceptual bias in height fear.

Emotion and psychopathology researchers have described the fear response as consisting of four main components--subjective affect, physiology, cognition, and behavior. The current study provides evidence for an additional component in the domain of height fear (perception) and shows that it is distinct from measures of cognitive processing. Individuals High (N = 35) and Low (N = 36) in acrophobic symptoms looked over a two-story balcony ledge and estimated its vertical extent using a direct height estimation task (visual matching), and an indirect task (size estimation); the latter task seems to exhibit little influence from cognitive factors. In addition, implicit and explicit measures of cognitive processing were obtained. Results indicated that, as expected, the High Fear group showed greater relative, implicit height fear associations and explicit threat cognitions. Of primary interest, the High (compared to Low) Fear group estimated the vertical extent to be higher, and judged target sizes to be greater, even when controlling for the cognitive bias measures. These results suggest that emotional factors such as fear are related to perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bringing work home: The emotional experiences of mothers and fathers.

Given the salience of work in our society, this study investigated how intrinsic work motivation, work hours, and taking time for self influenced the interplay between the emotional climates of work and home. The authors examined day-to-day emotional transmission between work and home (spillover) for 143 families using the experience sampling method and interview data from the Sloan Center's 500 Family Study (L. J. Waite & B. Schneider, 1997). Intrinsic work motivation, work hours, and taking time for self were used as predictors of spillover. There was evidence of emotional transmission from work to home for mothers' happiness, anger, and anxiety as well as for father's anxiety. Also, fathers scoring higher on intrinsic work motivation tended to report greater overall anxiety at home after the workday. Anxiety from work was less likely to spill over to the home when fathers reported working longer hours. These findings have practice implications for improving worker productivity and the well-being of two-working-parent families. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beyond cognition: Broadening the emotional base of motivational interviewing.

Motivational interviewing (MI) techniques have been described in cognitive and behavioral terms, as means to positively resolve tension created by unresolved ambivalence about change. This view of motivation is consistent with a negative reinforcement model, in which behaviors are performed to escape from negative states. In contrast, the concept of positive reinforcement involves seeking positive states through behaviors that lead toward more satisfying conditions. From this perspective, motivation involves a desire to experience positive emotions. This paper focuses on the potential role that emotions may play in MI, particularly positive emotions. The authors posit that MI elicits positive emotions of interest, hope, contentment and inspiration by inviting clients to envision a better future, to remember past successes, and to gain confidence in their abilities to improve their lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditional reasoning in autism: Activation and integration of knowledge and belief.

Everyday conditional reasoning is typically influenced by prior knowledge and belief in the form of specific exceptions known as counterexamples. This study explored whether adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; N = 26) were less influenced by background knowledge than typically developing adolescents (N = 38) when engaged in conditional reasoning. Participants were presented with pretested valid and invalid conditional inferences with varying available counterexamples. The group with ASD showed significantly less influence of prior knowledge on valid inferences (p = .01) and invalid inferences (p = .01) compared with the typical group. In a secondary probability judgment task, no significant group differences were found in probabilistic judgments of the believability of the premises. Further experiments found that results could not be explained by differences between the groups in the ability to generate counterexamples or any tendency among adolescents with ASD to exhibit a “yes” response pattern. It was concluded that adolescents with ASD tend not to spontaneously contextualize presented material when engaged in everyday reasoning. These findings are discussed with reference to weak central coherence theory and the conditional reasoning literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intact implicit learning of spatial context and temporal sequences in childhood autism spectrum disorder.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is defined by atypicalities in domains that are posited to rely on implicit learning processes such as social communication, language, and motor behavior. The authors examined 2 forms of implicit learning in 14 children with high-functioning ASD (10 of whom were diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome) and 14 control children, learning of spatial context known to be mediated by the medial temporal lobes (using the contextual cueing task) and of sequences known to be mediated by frontal-striatal and frontal-cerebellar circuits (using the alternating serial reaction time task). Both forms of learning were unimpaired in ASD. Spatial contextual implicit learning was spared in ASD despite slower visual search of spatial displays. The present findings provide evidence for the integrity of learning processes dependent on integration of spatial and sequential contextual information in high-functioning children with ASD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When you and I are "we," you are not threatening: The role of self-expansion in social comparison.

Many theories of self-evaluation emphasize the power of social comparison. Simply put, an individual is thought to gain esteem whenever she or he outperforms others and to lose esteem when he or she is outperformed. The current research explored interdependent self-construal as a moderator of these effects. Two studies used a priming task to manipulate the level of self-construal and investigate effects of social comparison in dyadic (Study 1) and group situations (Study 2). Both studies demonstrated that when the target for comparison is construed as part of the self, his or her successes become cause for celebration rather than costs to esteem. Additionally, gender differences in chronic relational and collective self-construals moderated the patterns of social comparison in a form similar to that of priming relational and collective self-construals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The structure of emotional expressivity: Each emotion counts.

Several models of the dimensionality of emotional expressivity were examined in a multitrait-multimethod study. Targets and peer raters completed measures of the target's emotional expressivity (Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire, BEQ; J. J. Gross & O. P. John, 1995; and a measure of emotion-specific expression) and the Big 5 personality dimensions. The results of structural equation modeling and analysis of variance revealed that an emotion-specific model was superior to models of valence-specific or unidimensional expressivity. The distinct emotions differed in their relations with the dimensions of the 5-factor model. These results were corroborated by self- and other reports. Finally, the degree of convergence between self- and other ratings differed between emotions, demonstrating the multidimensional character of emotional expressivity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modulation of Focused Attention by Faces Expressing Emotion: Evidence From Flanker Tasks.

Three experiments evaluated whether facial expression can modulate the allocation of focused attention. Identification of emotionally expressive target faces was typically faster when they were flanked by identical (compatible) faces compared with when they were flanked by different (incompatible) faces. This flanker compatibility effect was significantly smaller when target faces expressed negative compared with positive emotion (see Experiment 1A); however, when the faces were altered to disrupt emotional expression, yet retain feature differences, equal flanker compatibility effects were observed (see Experiment 1B). The flanker-compatibility effect was also found to be smaller for negative target faces compared compatibility with neutral target faces, and for both negative and neutral target faces compared with positive target faces (see Experiment 2). These results suggest that the constriction of attention is influenced by facial expressions of emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self ratings of fear in a fear-invoking situation.

"Airborne trainees were asked to mark on a self rating scale the amount of fear they felt during mock-tower jumping. One group of trainees rated fear in the mock tower just prior to jumping and the second group completed the rating after they had finished mock-tower training. For both groups, performance was related to the self rating of fear. Those who subsequently passed the Airborne course estimated that they were less afraid than those who failed it… . The study appeared to show the reliability and validity of a self rating on fear." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Poignancy: Mixed emotional experience in the face of meaningful endings.

The experience of mixed emotions increases with age. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that mixed emotions are associated with shifting time horizons. Theoretically, perceived constraints on future time increase appreciation for life, which, in turn, elicits positive emotions such as happiness. Yet, the very same temporal constraints heighten awareness that these positive experiences come to an end, thus yielding mixed emotional states. In 2 studies, the authors examined the link between the awareness of anticipated endings and mixed emotional experience. In Study 1, participants repeatedly imagined being in a meaningful location. Participants in the experimental condition imagined being in the meaningful location for the final time. Only participants who imagined "last times" at meaningful locations experienced more mixed emotions. In Study 2, college seniors reported their emotions on graduation day. Mixed emotions were higher when participants were reminded of the ending that they were experiencing. Findings suggest that poignancy is an emotional experience associated with meaningful endings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Abstract reasoning in autism: A disassociation between concept formation and concept identification.

The concept identification and concept formation aspects of abstract reasoning were examined in 90 nonmentally retarded individuals with autism and 107 normal controls. It was hypothesized that pronounced deficits would be found on concept formation tests, whereas performance on concept identification tests would be relatively intact. There was a significant difference between individuals with autism and individuals from a matched control group on all abstract reasoning tasks, but, with the exception of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (R. K. Heaton et al., 1993), differences on concept identification tests were not clinically significant. Factor analyses showed that concept formation and concept identification tasks loaded on separate factors in the autism group but not in the control group. Stepwise discriminant function analyses revealed that 2 tests of concept formation correctly classified 78.4% of cases, whereas concept identification tasks did not pass the tolerance test. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Choosing to be afraid: Preferences for fear as a function of goal pursuit.

According to an instrumental approach to emotion regulation (M. Tamir, in press), people may not always prefer to feel pleasant emotions and avoid unpleasant ones. Instead, they may be motivated to experience even unpleasant emotions when they might be useful for goal attainment. Given that fear serves to promote successful avoidance, these studies tested this hypothesis by examining preferences for fear in preparation for avoidance goal pursuits. Consistent with the predictions of the instrumental approach, participants preferred to increase their level of fear as they prepared to pursue an avoidance goal. Such preferences were higher than preferences for either excitement or anger and were unique to avoidance (vs. approach or confrontational) goal pursuits. Given the aversive nature of fear, these findings clearly demonstrate that people may sometimes prefer to feel bad if doing so can lead to instrumental benefits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young infants' generalization of emotional expressions: Effects of familiarity.

From birth, infants are exposed to a wealth of emotional information in their interactions. Much research has been done to investigate the development of emotion perception, and factors influencing that development. The current study investigates the role of familiarity on 3.5-month-old infants' generalization of emotional expressions. Infants were assigned to one of two habituation sequences: in one sequence, infants were visually habituated to parental expressions of happy or sad. At test, infants viewed either a continuation of the habituation sequence, their mother depicting a novel expression, an unfamiliar female depicting the habituated expression, or an unfamiliar female depicting a novel expression. In the second sequence, a new sample of infants was matched to the infants in the first sequence. These infants viewed the same habituation and test sequences, but the actors were unfamiliar to them. Only those infants who viewed their own mothers and fathers during the habituation sequence increased looking. They dishabituated looking to maternal novel expressions, the unfamiliar female's novel expression, and the unfamiliar female depicting the habituated expression, especially when sad parental expressions were followed by an expression change to happy or to a change in person. Infants are guided in their recognition of emotional expressions by the familiarity of their parents, before generalizing to others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)