Article summary of Emotion awareness in children with high-functioning autism by Rieffe et al. - Chapter

Introduction

Children with autism experience difficulties when moving around others. It is also suggested that they do not have a properly functioning Theory of Mind (ToM). This ToM is needed to be aware of your own mental states and to understand your own functioning. Children with autism who do not have a properly functioning ToM will not be able to evaluate themselves.

How do autistic children show emotional awareness?

Children with autism appear to show more emotions when viewing non-living objects compared to children without this disorder. This is striking, because they react less emotionally in social situations. They do not make sufficient or even no use of the communicative values ​​of emotional expressions. There is no further reason to believe that they are less emotional than others. An emotional state does not directly involve emotional awareness. Controlling one's own emotional processes is a capacity that children must learn.

To label emotions, one needs introspective information, his or her own behavioral observations, and the verbal information provided by others. Normally developing children do not yet have a good introspective capacity. Due to the lack of self-reflection, they cannot properly explain what they feel. Adults have better introspection and are better able to explain how they feel and why. However, it is hardly possible to explain what it is that they feel.

According to cognitive emotion theorists, we become aware of a primitive action tendency. For example, fear comes to the fore due to the tendency to run away. The question is whether is the same in children with autism who do not have a fully functioning ToM. Earlier research has shown that autistic children understand the link between the four basic emotions (fear, anger, joy and sorrow) and their causal events. However, only through introspection or through the careful observation of others will anyone be able to find out that there are always exceptions to the rules. Children with autism are known to ignore the emotional expressions of others. Especially in exceptional situations, an austistic child will not notice the emotion. For example, fear is linked to a large dog. If someone is then afraid of small downy hamsters, a child with autism will not notice the fear of the person in question. Research has shown that they are able to give descriptions and give examples of various emotions, but their examples refer less often to social interactions.

Multiple emotions

It is important to note that in addition to a few prototypical situations, almost all situations can be viewed from different perspectives.
When young children have discovered one of the perspectives, they tend to stop analyzing. Around nine years old, children generally begin to recognize the existence of simultaneous emotion perspectives. First they discover that it is possible to have two similar emotions at the same time. These are emotions of the same valence (two positive or two negative), for example angry and sad. A little later they discover that it is possible to feel two equal emotions of different valence at the same time, such as happy and sad.

The possibility of looking at one and the same situation from different perspectives is a possibility that is also closely related to the Theory of Mind. To have a Theory of Mind, it is necessary to understand that someone can have a different perspective on things. Different emotions in the same situation also reflect different action trends.

What are the objectives of this study?

The first goal of this study is to investigate the ability of high functioning children with autism to produce concrete examples of emotion-provoking situations from their own experiences. As a hypothesis it was expected that there will be no differences between normally developing children and children with autism in terms of their ability of possible situations in which they experience one of the basic emotions. They could therefore come up with about as many possible situations. The reactions of the children were analyzed in two ways. First, the extent to which the children use their own experiences as a frame of reference was studied. Then it was studied whether the examples are social or non-social examples.

The second goal was to study whether highly functioning children with autism are aware of the multiple emotional impressions of situations that contain different emotional perspectives. The hypothesis was that children with autism would score worse than normally developed children.

Which research method was applied?

Participants

22 children with autism (20 boys, 2 girls) and 22 normally developing children (20 boys, 2 girls). The average age was 10 years and 2 months. The autistic children were all diagnosed with Classic Autism or Asperger's syndrome according to the DSM-IV criteria.

Emotion identification

As an introduction, the children were asked to identify 'pride'. The emotion served as a useful introductory question, which also provided a better balance between negative and positive emotions. The four basic emotions (fear, anger, joy, and sadness) that followed to identify were presented in a random order. To see to what extent the children recognized their own emotional experiences, the children were asked questions.

Scoring

The reactions of the children were classified as social (explicit references to another person) or non-social. In addition, references to a specific situation or event were interpreted as an indication that children used their own experiences as a frame of reference, rather than using prescribed knowledge about emotion-provoking events.

Multiple emotions

To start with, the children were asked to imagine that the event in the story happened to them. The Multiple Emotions task consists of an example story (accompanied by drawings) and the instruction to inform the children about the possibility of experiencing more than one emotion at a time. Children viewed drawings of social expressions, which correspond to the four emotions in the story. They were asked what emotions the child would feel and how intense these emotions are. Afterwards, four stories were offered to the children. Two of these stories were designed to provoke both positive and negative emotions (joy and sadness). The other two stories were designed to provoke multiple negative emotions (anger and sadness). To avoid too many stories with a negative impression, two stories were added that were designed to only provoke joy.

What are the results?

Some emotions

In comparison with the control group, children with autism were more likely to deny that they had ever experienced one or more of the four emotions when asked about some emotions. In addition, they reported fewer negative emotions. These results were only significant for anger. The children with autism made fewer references to specific situations and gave fewer social examples than the group with normally developed children. The intensity of the emotions showed that joy was experienced more strongly than the three negative emotions. This was the same for the experimental and control group.

Multiple emotions

Among the multiple emotions, it turned out that autistic children named fewer different emotional perspectives per story. This result does not directly suggest that these children recognize multiple emotional perspectives less often, because it is possible to attribute more than two emotional perspectives to the same multiple emotion scenario. Furthermore, it was found that children from both autistic and normally developing groups more often recognized the multiple perspective when it involved two negative emotions. The average intensity experienced with the emotions joy and anxiety also did not differ between the two groups. Finally, it turned out that if the autistic children recognized the other two emotions (anger and sadness), they reported these emotions as being less intense. 

Discussion

Children with autism would feel less to no emotions, they could report fewer emotional situations from their own experience and recognize fewer different emotional perspectives in the multiple emotion scenarios. Children with autism are similar to the control group when detecting emotions from an opposite domain in a scenario. They are not the same when detecting emotions from the same domain. This suggests that we cannot attribute their problems to delays in development. The recognition of simultaneous emotions from the same domain normally precedes the recognition of the simultaneous appearance of opposing emotions. The research also shows that autistic children find it difficult to identify their own emotions. This means that it is difficult for them to state how they feel. The experimental group of children would not have a well-developed knowledge of their own emotions, which can be indicated by the finding that they also use fewer coping strategies to deal with the negative emotions. The results of this study seem to point to a simpler, single-emotion perspective in the negative domain with a more important position of anxiety in children with autism than in the control group, rather than using multiple emotion perspectives.