Emotional Mimicry and Contagion in Children with Autism, Down Syndrome and Typical Development

Background: Affective and empathic impairments have long been recognised in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). To date, however, research has tended to focus on higher-level processes of empathic and prosocial responsiveness, with little attention yet given to the earlier emerging forms of emotional mimicry/contagion. Typical empathic development is proposed to begin with neonatal contagious crying, which is gradually replaced by empathic concern and prosocial helping. As with crying, laughter also typically develops under minimal conscious control, and becomes readily ‘contagious'. This form of contagion, however, remains through adulthood. Objectives: Given the well-established deficits in empathic responsiveness in ASD, and the proposed developmental link between higher-level empathy and lower-level forms of emotional mimicry/contagion, investigation of contagion responses in ASD should serve to further inform the precise nature emotional deficits in this condition. The current study presented young children with ASD and matched controls with live stimuli designed to elicit varying degrees of empathy and contagious responses. Differential responding between children with ASD and controls would suggest a basic affective impairment in this condition, whereas similar responding would suggest that emotion only becomes impaired at higher-levels. Methods: Participants were 69 young children (aged between 23 months and 8 years 2 months) with ASD, Down syndrome or typical development. Within a play session, several emotional scenarios were presented; a replication of Sigman et al.'s (1992) pain scenario to assess empathy, and two novel scenarios to assess emotional mimicry/contagion (an adult laughing and the sounds of an infant crying). Children's responses were coded for duration of attention toward the emotional displays, duration of congruent affective displays (i.e., positive or negative expression), and evidence of contagious emotion (i.e., child crying or laughter, as appropriate). Results: In line with past research, the children with ASD were significantly less empathic than controls, looking less toward the adult in pain. Across all groups, however, children were not particularly negative, upset, or prosocial in their responsiveness. Children with ASD were similarly less attentive than controls toward the display of adult laughter. However, despite this lack of attention, they equally often displayed congruent positive affect and contagious laughter as did controls. Finally, the children with ASD were equally attentive toward the sound of infant cries as were controls, with children in all groups equally likely to approach to investigate the source of the sound, and to show negative facial affect. Conclusions: This study replicates previous findings of a higher-order empathy deficit (i.e., in responding to the pain scenario) in children with ASD. By contrast, children with ASD were found to show greater responsiveness during the scenarios of adult laughter and infant cries. This suggests that while empathy is impaired in ASD, at some base-level, emotional mimicry/contagion is spared. Further research should seek to replicate this finding, which has implications for our understanding of emotional functioning in ASD, as well as for the typical developmental link between mimicry/contagion responses and higher-order empathy skills.