Regarding sex differences in social cognition, females have been ascertained to understand nonverbal communication better than males do (Hall, 1978). Even three-year-old girls can understand another’s emotions and thoughts better than boys of the same age do; that is, girls are already ahead of boys regarding mind-reading ability (Baron-Cohen, 2003). With respect to the sex differences, the individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) display inherent deficits in mind-reading abilities. The results of this study, using the Cambridge Mindreading test, revealed that females recognized emotions from facial expressions better than males did, regardless of the diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (Golan, 2006).
Objectives: We aimed to examine the sex difference in the mind-reading ability for the both of the groups with and without the ASD in nonverbal communication by using an advanced mind-reading test, which included both visual and auditory tasks.
Methods: The participants comprised 28 male adults with ASD (mean age = 24.5±7.7 yrs, FIQ= 105±12) and 13 female adults with ASD (mean age = 28.3±9.9 yrs, FIQ= 112±11). The control groups comprised 49 male adults (mean age = 20.7±1.5 yrs) and 38 female adults (mean age = 20.6±1.7 yrs). The advanced mind-reading tasks comprising 41 video clips were designed to assess mind-reading ability from either visual information alone (facial expressions, gestures, posture) or auditory information alone (non-verbal aspects of speech: pitch/intonation/tone). A word or a phrase that expressed the mental state was shown along with each video and sound clip. The participants were asked to judge whether each word or phrase was appropriate for each scene.
Results:
To test for differences between the accuracy rates of the visual and auditory tasks among the groups (modality effect) and between them (a modality by group interaction), an ANOVA was performed with the accuracy rates as dependent variables and with group and sex as independent variables. A three-way interaction of modality by group by sex was found to be significant (F [1, 124] = 5.43, p = 0.02). An analysis of simple main effects revealed that while there existed no differences between the control groups (male: Visual = 70.4%, Auditory = 70.4%; female: Visual = 69.3%, Auditory = 69.1%) and females with ASD (Visual = 69.5%, Auditory = 70.1%) for both tasks, there was a significant difference among males with ASD (Visual = 66.0%, Auditory = 58.8%). Additionally, positive correlations were found for the female group with ASD with respect to the accuracy rates for both tasks and FIQ.
Conclusions: These results suggest that the female adults with ASD compensated for their deficits in mind-reading by using their intelligence. Clinically, while the males with ASD may exhibit severe social problems, the deficits of females with ASD appear to be subtle. However, females with ASD exhibit some stress because they do not understand others’ emotions intuitively but always need to make an effort to do so by using their intelligence.
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