Emotional Understanding in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background:  

In typically developing children, emotional understanding emerges around the age of 24 months, and shows the greatest increase between the ages of 4 and 10 years.  Studies of emotional understanding in children with ASD reveal that, although they label as many emotions as typical children, they have more difficulty identifying their own emotions and are more likely to reference inanimate objects than living things when identifying emotions.  Previous studies have examined emotional understanding in children with ASD using a wide range of techniques.  However the majority of these techniques involved the use of experimental tasks (e.g., face recognition, interpreting a script) that had very little relationship to interpersonal experience.

Objectives:  

To examine emotional understanding in children with and without ASD within an interpersonal framework during a developmental period when emotional understanding shows the greatest increase.   

Methods:  

Participants included 10 children with a diagnosis of ASD and 10 children without a diagnosis of ASD , matched for age (5-8 years), gender (50% males), race (all Caucasian), and FSIQ (mean=103; SD=11.23; range=82-128).   As part of an annual assessment, all children were administered Module 3 of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Scale (ADOS) by a trained clinician.  An emotional understanding coding system was developed to document use of contextually appropriate emotion-related language in the following ADOS tasks:  Description of Picture, Telling a Story from a Book, and Emotions.

Results:  

During the Picture and Book tasks, the ASD group was more likely than the No-ASD group to label emotions (80% ASD and 50% No-ASD); however the difference was not statistically significant, Fisher’s exact test, p > .05.  During the Emotion task, a higher percentage of the No-ASD group acknowledged and responded appropriately to emotion questions (gave a response that was on topic) for four of the five emotions: Happy, Scared, Angry, and Sad.  However, the between-group difference was statistically significant for only one emotion (Scared; Fisher Exact test, p = .04). Children with and without ASD also differed in what they referenced in describing these emotions. The No-ASD group was more likely to reference an animate being (person, animal; 60% of No-ASD; 40% of ASD); the ASD group was more likely to reference an inanimate entity (object or an action) without reference to the agent (60% of ASD; 20% of No-ASD; Fisher exact test, p = .18).

Conclusions:  

Results support previous research in emotional understanding in children with and without ASD.   Compared with their unaffected peers, children with ASD in the current study were more likely to label emotions during a structured task (Picture and Book), but were less likely to respond appropriately to questions about their emotions, and when they did respond, they were more likely to mention an inanimate than animate source of emotional experience. The ADOS appears to provide a contextual framework for examining emotional understanding in children with and without ASD.  However, further research with larger samples is needed to verify these findings.