- Tous
les articles sur la contagion du
bâillement
- All
articles about contagious
yawning
-
- Helt MS, Eigsti
IM, Snyder PJ, Fein DA. Contagious yawning
in autistic and typical development. Child Dev.
2010;81(5):1620-163
-
- Abstract
-
- Although deficits in cognitive empathy are
well established in individuals with autism
spectrum disorder (ASD), the literature on
emotional empathy, or emotional contagion, in
individuals with ASD is sparse and
contradictory.
-
- The authors tested susceptibility to
contagious yawning and laughter in children with
ASD (n = 60) and typically developing (TD)
children (n = 60), ages 5-17 years, under
various conditions, to elucidate factors that
may affect emotional contagion in these
populations.
-
- Although TD children showed equal amounts of
emotional contagion across conditions, children
with ASD were highly influenced by the
familiarity of the target stimulus, as well as
task instructions that encourage eye gaze to
target. More specifically, children with ASD
exhibited less contagious yawning and laughter
than their TD peers except when their attention
was explicitly directed to the eyes or (and even
more so) when their parents served as the
stimulus targets. The authors explore the
implications of these findings for theories
about the mechanisms underlying empathic
deficits in ASD as well as the clinical
implications of having parents involved in
treatment.
-
- Résumé
-
- Bien que les déficits en empathie
cognitive soient bien établis chez les
personnes atteintes de troubles du spectre
autistique (TSA), la littérature sur
l'empathie émotionnelle, ou la contagion
émotionnelle, chez les personnes
atteintes de TSA est modeste et
contradictoire.
-
- Les auteurs ont testé la
sensibilité au bâillement et au
rire contagieux chez les enfants atteints de TSA
(n = 60) et les enfants normaux en croissance
(TD) (n = 60 ans) âgés de 5
à 17 ans, dans diverses conditions, afin
d'élucider les facteurs pouvant affecter
la contagion émotionnelle dans ces
populations.
-
- Bien que les enfants TD aient
présenté des niveaux égaux
de contagion émotionnelle, quelles que
soient les conditions, les enfants atteints de
TSA étaient fortement influencés
par la familiarité du stimulus cible,
ainsi que par les instructions de tâches
qui désigne le regard à
cibler.
-
- Plus spécifiquement, les enfants
atteints de TSA manifestaient des
bâillements et des rires moins contagieux
que leurs pairs TD, sauf quand leur attention
est explicitement dirigée vers les yeux
ou (et plus encore) lorsque leurs parents
servaient de cibles déclenchantes.
-
- Les auteurs explorent les implications de
ces résultats dans l'établissement
de théories des mécanismes
sous-jacents aux déficits empathiques de
TSA, ainsi que les implications cliniques de la
participation des parents au traitement.
-
- Emotional contagion refers to the tendency
to automatically assume some degree of the
emotions of those with whom we interact
(Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994).
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
tend to demonstrate decreased emotional
contagion and empathy under some circumstances
(Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). A better
understanding of how and when emotional
contagion is triggered in individuals with ASD,
and its potential relationship to empathic
development, has implications for both
understanding the neural bases of the disorder
and optimizing early intervention.
-
- One mechanism by which emotional contagion
may come about is via the underlying process of
mimicry (HatÞeld et al., 1994). In
contrast to imitation, which involves the
conscious, effortful reproduction of another's
behavior, mimicry refers to nonvolitional
"matching" behavior (Want & Harris, 2002).
Electromyography (EMG) research reveals that as
human beings engage in face to face interaction,
we unconsciously mimic (often at a level
undetectable to the naked eye) one another's
posture, facial expressions, vocal prosody,
speech patterns, gestures, and emotional
expressions (e.g., Niedenthal, Barsalou, Ric,
& Krauth-Gruber, 2005). The classic
James&endash;Lange hypothesis asserts that the
observer perceives the target's posture and
expressions, her musculature mimics that of the
other, and the brain interprets feedback from
its own musculature as signaling the emotion in
question (e.g., James, 1890). Alternatively, the
observer may represent and recognize the emotion
that he/she infers from the other's actions; the
recognition of that emotion may overþow
its neuronal representation and become embodied
in the observer's musculature, causing mimicry
(Preston & de Waal, 2002). The embodiment
may subsequently "feed back" cen- trally to
generate or enhance the relevant emotion (Moody,
McIntosh, Mann, & Weisser, 2007).
-
- This emotional contagion or "embodied
communication" (Kinsbourne & Jordan, 2009)
between observer and target is often described
as "emotional" or "affective" empathy (Davis,
1996; Preston & de Waal, 2002; although some
definitions differ, e.g., see De Vignemont &
Singer, 2006) and has been proposed to be a
crucial component in developing cognitive
empathy (Decety & Jackson, 2004; Preston
& de Waal, 2002; Singer & Lamm, 2009),
in which deficits among individuals with ASD are
well documented (Baron-Cohen, 2000). The amount
of automatic mimicry, observed via behavioral
coding (Sonnby-Borgstrom, 2002), and measured in
movements of the facial muscles via EMG
(Andreasson & Dimburg, 2008), both correlate
positively with an individual's level of
emotional empathy (taking on the emotions of
others; Andreasson & Dimburg, 2008; Kaplan
& Iacoboni, 2006; Sonnby-Borgstrom, 2002),
as well as cognitive empathy (taking on the
perspective of others; Chartrand & Bargh,
1999).
-
- Because mimicry automatically occurs when a
person observes or engages with another person,
neuroimaging studies in which participants
passively observe the actions or the emotions of
others presumably capture the neural correlates
of nonvolitional mimicry, which consistently
reveal common coding for first- and third-person
experiences. Such common coding has been
reported for disgust (Wicker et al., 2003), pain
(Singer et al., 2004), touch (Keysers et al.,
2004), emotional body language (de Gelder &
Hadjikhani, 2006), and emotional expressions
(Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau, Mazziotta, & Lenzi,
2003) in the insula and anterior cingulate,
while common coding for contagious actions, such
as yawning and laughter, are observed in the
inferior frontal cortices and sensorimotor
cortices (Haker, Kawohl, Herwig, & Rossler,
2013; Meyer, Zysset, von Cramon, & Alter,
2005) with some studies showing insula
activation. The insula (particularly, the
anterior insular cortex) has been suggested to
mediate the transformation of a perceived action
into an emotional experience by relaying
information about action representation from the
superior temporal and inferior frontal cortices
(sometimes referred to as "the mirror neuron
system") to the limbic system (Carr et al.,
2003). This relay is proposed to allow
information about the actions of others (e.g., a
facial expression) to provoke an emotional
experience (e.g., emotional empathy), with the
resulting shared neural representation providing
an "embodied theory of mind"
(Corradi-Dell'Acqua, Hofstetter, &
Vuilleumier, 2011; Gu et al., 2015; Singer &
Lamm, 2009; Wicker et al., 2003). The passive
viewing of contagious actions and emotional
expressions while undergoing functional magnetic
resonance imaging reveals that individuals with
greater activation in shared neural
representations (i.e., greater embodiment of the
target's state) are also associated with
individual levels of emotional empathy (Gazzola,
Aziz-Zadeh, & Keysers, 2006; Kaplan &
Iacoboni, 2006), cognitive empathy (Gazzola et
al., 2006; Platek, Myers, Critton, & Gallup,
2003), or both (Arnott, Singhal, & Goodale,
2009; Pfeifer, Iacoboni, Mazziotta, &
Dapretto, 2008).
-
- Some researchers have proposed that the
empathy deficits observed in individuals with
ASD can be attributed to a "broken mirror"
system (Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006; Oberman
& Ramachandran, 2007; Ramachandran &
Oberman, 2006; Rizzolatti & Fabbri-Destro,
2010; Williams, Whiten, Suddendor, &
Perrett, 2001), or abnormalities in cortical and
subcortical net- works involved in emotion
contagion (Hadjikhani et al., 2009), which deny
individuals with ASD the experience of shared
neural representations and emotions during face
to face interactions; however, these notions are
hotly debated (see Leighton, Bird, Charman,
& Heyes, 2008; Southgate & Hamilton,
2008).
-
- Contagious Yawning
- Contagious yawning is a type of mimicry in
that it is a matching behavior that is produced
automatically. However, unlike the miniscule
muscular movements that mimicry typically
entails, yawns are large, obvious sequences of
movements. The explanation for this may derive
from the fact that yawning is a Þxed
action pattern (Provine, 1986), which is a
species-typical behavioral sequence that is
indivisible and, once initiated, runs to
completion. Mimicking the Þrst part of a
Þxed action pattern may trigger the
release of the entire behavior.
-
- In addition to being a form of mimicry,
contagious yawning may involve an emotional
component. Deputte (1994) identiÞed two
contexts for yawns: the "rest yawn," when there
is a change in arousal level, and the "emotion
yawn," which is used as an unconscious
communication of psychological decompression
after a state of high alert. The construct of an
emotion yawn suggests that contagious yawning
may be considered a form of emotional contagion.
Yawning is similar to other contagious acts
(e.g., crying and laughing) in that it produces
a distinct sound, as well as a distinct facial
expression (Provine, 1996). In contrast, yawning
may not signal an emotion but may simply be a
facial expression that is unintentionally
mimicked, as are other nonemotional facial
expressions (Heyes, 2001). Ubiquitous facial
mimicry may be adaptive because it facilitates
contagion of "true" emotions. In either case,
the disruption of mimicry, which may be
demonstrated by a disruption in contagious
yawning, should have consequences for emotional
resonance with others. People with high levels
of empathy exhibit greater amounts contagious
yawning (Norscia & Palagi, 2011; Platek et
al., 2003).
-
- Automatic Mimicry and Emotional Contagion
in ASD
- Whereas TD individuals tend to automatically
attend to and mimic emotional cues, individuals
with ASD may show decreased (McIntosh,
Reichmann-Decker, Winkielman, & Wilbarger,
2006; Yoshimura, Sato, Uono, & Toichi, 2015)
and atypical (Beall, Moody, McIntosh, Hepburn,
& Reed, 2008; Oberman, Winkielman, &
Ramachandran, 2009) spontaneous mimicry and
decreased emotional contagion. Helt, Eigsti,
Snyder, and Fein (2010) assessed contagious
yawning in children with ASD under naturalistic
circumstances and reported its occurrence to be
very low in children with mild ASD symptomology
and absent in children with moderate to severe
symptomology. Similarly, lab- oratory studies
exposing individuals with ASD to prerecorded
video (Senju et al., 2007) and audio (Giganti
& Esposito Ziello, 2009) clips show markedly
decreased rates of contagious yawning in
individuals with ASD compared with their
typiclly developing (TD) peers. Finally,
Scambler, Hepburn, Rutherford, Wehner, and
Rogers (2006) presented strong facial and bodily
models of joy, disgust, pain, and fear, and
reported that children with ASD responded with
significantly fewer instances of emotional
contagion than controls.
-
- Sims, Van Reekum, Johnstone, and Chakrabarti
(2012) found that TD participants with low (but
not high) ASD traits demonstrated greater
mimicry for faces that they had been trained to
associate with high (vs. low) reward values,
indicating that, in general, people will tend to
show greater mimicry to faces they find more
rewarding. In contrast, participants with high
ASD traits showed similar amounts of mimicry to
target stimuli regard- less of reward value,
indicating that individuals with ASD may be less
sensitive than their peers to cues associated
with social reward. This evidence aligns with
theories that posit that children with ASD
experience reduced social reward sensitivity,
which manifests in reduced ability to
affectively tag socially relevant stimuli
(Dawson, Bernier, & Ring, 2012; Fein,
Pennington, Markowitz, Braverman, &
Waterhouse, 1986; Klin, Jones, Schultz, &
Volkmar, 2003; Waterhouse, Fein, & Modahl,
1996).
-
- Although behavioral evidence consistently
reveals that children with ASD show less
emotional contagion than their TD peers, other
studies suggest the possibility of intact or
even heightened emotional contagion among
individuals with ASD. Hadjikhani et al. (2009)
showed that brain activation in individuals with
ASD did not differ from controls when
participants viewed fear or pain (Hadjikhani et
al., 2014). Blair (1999) reported that children
with ASD showed typical psychophysiological
responses to images of distressed people.
Meanwhile, Gu et al. (2015) reported that
individuals with ASD showed heightened autonomic
arousal (though reduced embodiment, or shared
neural representation) when viewing others in
pain. Self-report questionnaires, such as the
Interpersonal Reactivity Index and the
Multifaceted Empathy Test, have revealed
impairments in cognitive empathy, but either
normal (Dziobek et al., 2008) or heightened
emotional empathy among adults with Asperger
syndrome (Rogers, Dziobek, Hassenstab, Wolf,
& Convit, 2007). Finally, Magnee, de Gelder,
van Engeland, and Kemner (2007) used EMG to
measure subtle emotional responses in a small
group of high- functioning individuals with ASD.
The researchers reported that the participants
with ASD showed heightened electromyographic
responsiveness both to happy and to fearful
faces compared to controls. This evidence of
heightened emotional empathy aligns with
theories that posit that children with ASD begin
life with normal social attention and then
defensively turn their attention away from
social stimuli because it is overarousing
(Kinsbourne, 2011; Markram, Rinaldi, &
Markram, 2007; Smith, 2009).`
-
- Regardless of the underlying cause of
impaired social attention in ASD, it undoubtedly
plays a role in the reduced emotional contagion
previously observed in individuals with ASD.
Research in another area of social cognition,
face perception, has demonstrated that under
default circumstances, individuals with ASD show
reduced fusiform face activity (FFA; Schultz et
al., 2000) compared to controls; however, if
participants are continuously cued to the eye
region, these group differences disappear
(Hadjikhani et al., 2004). Individuals with ASD
have been documented to show very reduced
attention to another's pain (Bacon, Fein,
Morris, & Waterhouse, 1998; Sigman,
Dissanayake, Corona, & Espinosa, 2003).
However, Scambler et al. (2006) gained the
child's attention before assessing emotional
contagion, and found it still reduced,
supporting the notion that social attention
cannot account for all of the reduction in
emotional contagion.
-
- Eye contact with the target has been
suggested to trigger contagious yawning. For
example, Provine (1989) demonstrated that TD
individuals will yawn contagiously if shown the
disembodied eyes of a yawning face, but not the
disembodied mouths. To test the possibility that
diminished contagious yawning in ASD is due to
diminished eye gaze, Senju et al. (2009)
instructed children to fixate on the eyes of
yawning faces and found no group differences in
the rate of contagious yawning between TD and
ASD children; however, as the TD group yawned
the same amount, to yawn and control stimuli
these results are difficult to interpret.
Further complicating the picture, Giganti and
Esposito Ziello (2009) found that individuals
with ASD also showed reduced yawn contagion when
presented with an auditory only yawning stimulus
indicating that lack of eye gaze cannot
completely explain diminished yawn contagion in
ASD.
-
- Research on other aspects of
social&endash;emotional functioning in ASD has
also revealed particularly strong effects of
stimulus familiarity in this population.
Individuals with ASD have been reported to show
enhanced language, social skills, cognitive test
scores, and even skin conductance responses when
"high-interest" stimuli are used (Koegel,
Koegel, & Smith, 1997; Pierce &
Schreibman, 1997; van Engeland, Roelofs,
Verbaten, & Slangen, 1991). Although Shultz
et al., (2000) reported diminished FFA
activation in response to faces in ASD, Pierce,
Haist, Sedaghat, and Courchesne (2004) found
that participants with ASD showed normal FFA
activity to
-
- familiar faces. Finally, although Bernier,
Dawson, Webb, and Murias (2007) and Oberman et
al. (2005) reported diminished mu wave
suppression (taken to indicate "mirror"
response) in participants with ASD when viewing
the hand motions of strangers, Oberman,
Ramachandran, and Pineda (2008) reported normal
mu wave suppression in participants with ASD
when viewing the hand movements of their family
members.
-
- Finally, mimicry studies on TD adults
indicate that preexisting rapport increases the
amount of mimicry one will show with an
interaction partner (Likowski, Muhlberger,
Seibt, Pauli, & Weyers, 2008; McIntosh,
2006; Tickle-Degnen, 2006), and that individuals
are most likely to contagiously yawn when
exposed to the yawn of a relative (Norscia &
Palagi, 2011), indicating that among the general
population the effects of social reward may be
more pronounced than the effects of attention
when it comes to mimicry. We know of no previous
research that has explored the impact of
stimulus familiarity on emotional contagion in
individuals with ASD.
-
- Current study
- In summary, the majority of the literature
shows reduced emotional contagion in ASD. This
has been attributed to attaching less reward
value to social stimuli, showing reduced social
attention to the target stimuli, or innate
neurological differences in the common coding of
actions and emotions. However, a handful of
studies implicate intact emotional contagion in
ASD, and research in other aspects of social
cognition reveal that individuals with ASD
appear to be disproportionately influenced by
study design, such as the familiarity or
importance of the target, and the task
instructions.
-
- Contagious yawning and laughing offer a
noninvasive approach (well tolerated by children
with ASD) to the study of mimicry (i.e.,
mirrorlike phenomena; Provine 2005b). Laughter
and yawning were chosen as the target responses
because they share several traits: (a) they have
emotional content; (b) they occur under both
spontaneous and contagious conditions (Provine,
2005b); (c) their spontaneous occurrence has
been shown not to be diminished in children with
ASD (Giganti & Esposito Ziello, 2009;
Hudenko, Stone, & Bachorowski, 2009); and
(d) TD individuals show similar amounts of
mimicry to both (as opposed to frowning; Estow,
Jamieson, & Yates, 2007).
-
- We explored emotional contagion in ASD under
different conditions, including manipulating
instructions to maximize eye gaze, and stimulus
familiarity. We hypothesized that if differences
are primarily mediated by eye gaze/social
attention, then manipulating task instructions
to maximize eye gaze to target should minimize
group differences, as should delivering the
stimuli in an auditory-only condition. If
differences are mediated by decreased reward
value of social stimuli, then increasing the
familiarity, and thus the social reward value,
of the stimuli should minimize group
differences. Finally, if reduced emotional
contagion is mainly due to innate neurological
differences in the mirror neuron areas of the
brain, then individuals with ASD should show
reduced emotional contagion across all
conditions.
-
- Discussion
- Consistent with a great deal of previous
research, children with ASD showed diminished
emotional contagion compared to their TD peers
under most conditions. However, when they were
exposed to the familiar, and presumably
rewarding, stimuli of their parents, or eye
contact with the stimulus was cued via task
instructions, they demonstrated rates of
emotional contagion approaching or comparable to
their TD peers. These findings offer a new
perspective as to whether emotional empathy is
reduced or intact among children with ASD,
showing that children with ASD may show either
typical or atypical rates of emotional contagion
depending upon the circumstances. The finding
that emotional contagion is intact in children
under some circum- stances is inconsistent with
the hypothesis that they have innate
abnormalities in neural systems associated with
emotional contagion, which prevent its
expression. Rather, it seems that reduced
emotional contagion may be secondary to problems
with social orienting and attention, which were
partially overcome in the cued to eyes
condition, and completely overcome in the
parents condition.
-
- The TD group displayed roughly the same
amount of emotional contagion across conditions.
In contrast, the ASD group displayed highly
varied amounts of emotional contagion depending
on the condition. For participants with ASD,
cueing-to-eyes resulted in more yawning and
laughter contagion compared to other conditions
(although not as powerfully as the parent
stimuli) and eliminated significant differences
in yawning contagion between groups. The latter
finding is consistent with that of Senju et al.
(2009) as well as the hypothesis that reduced
social attention, in particular to the eyes, at
least partially mediates the diminished
emotional contagion previously reported among
individuals with ASD. Continuous cueing to the
eyes has previously been found to result in
normal neural activation during face processing
in an ASD population (Hadjikhani et al., 2004).
The striking increase in rates of emotional
contagion among children with ASD when eye gaze
is cued supports the importance of teaching
children with ASD early and often to attend to
the eyes of others via explicit instruction or
prompting (e.g., holding a desired object near
the other's eyes) and delivering early
intervention face-to-face so as to improve
opportunities for automatic affective
exchange.
-
- However, the only conditions in which the
ASD and TD means were truly comparable, and
which produced the same percentage of contagious
ASD responders as TD responders, were the
conditions in which the child's parent served as
the stimulus. These results align with previous
research reporting normal neural responses to
faces and actions in individuals with ASD only
in studies in which the stimuli were composed of
familiar individuals (Oberman et al., 2008;
Pierce et al., 2004). Typical levels of
emotional contagion between children with ASD
and their parents is also consistent with
previous research showing that children with ASD
are more likely to laugh at cartoons if viewing
them with their parents (Helt & Fein, 2016).
In addition, previous research suggests that
children with ASD display increased ability to
match facial and vocal expressions of emotion
when familiar adults are used as stimuli
(Kaana-Kalman & Goldman, 2008). Furthermore,
children with ASD show improved social
interaction skills (Knott, Lewis, &
Williams, 1995) as well as increased rates of
physical and eye contact (Kasari, Sigman, &
Yirmiya, 1993) when interacting with familiar,
as opposed to unfamiliar, individuals.
-
- ASD symptom severity was inversely
correlated to both contagious yawning and
laughter. This relationship was stronger in the
"naturalistic" conditions and weaker in the
parent condition, indicating that the amount of
emotional contagion that participants with ASD
show to strangers is more strongly indicative of
their core ASD symptomology than is the amount
of emotional contagion they show with their
parents. Contagion for both laughter and yawning
were also positively correlated with one
another, showed similar patterns across
conditions, and were both negatively correlated
with ASD severity, consistent with the idea that
emotional contagion is, to some degree, a
unified construct rely- ing on similar component
processes, one that is disrupted with strangers
to a greater degree in individuals with more
severe ASD symptoms.
-
- Candidate mechanisms
- ASD symptom severity was inversely
correlated to both contagious yawning and
laughter. This relationship was stronger in the
"naturalistic" conditions and weaker in the
parent condition, indicating that the amount of
emotional contagion that participants with ASD
show to strangers is more strongly indicative of
their core ASD symptomology than is the amount
of emotional conta- gion they show with their
parents. Contagion for both laughter and yawning
were also positively correlated with one
another, showed similar patterns across
conditions, and were both negatively correlated
with ASD severity, consistent with the idea that
emotional contagion is, to some degree, a
unified construct relying on similar component
processes, one that is disrupted with strangers
to a greater degree in individuals with more
severe ASD symptoms.
-
- First of all, perhaps the initial cueing to
the eyes was not enough to sustain the
children's motivation to continue to attend to
the eye region, whereas the connection with the
parent pro- vided an ongoing source of
motivation and reward to continue to attend.
Alternatively, it is possible that these effects
demonstrate what happens when the uncomfortable
arousal or anxiety of viewing strangers is
removed for the group with ASD. Dalton et al.
(2005) reported that in individuals with ASD,
but not controls, the amount of eye gaze was
significantly correlated with amygdala
activation while viewing both emotional and
nonemotional faces, suggesting that for
individuals with ASD, eye gaze fixation is
associated with emotional arousal. Perhaps even
when participants with ASD are cued to the eyes
of others, there remains an aversion to looking
for any longer than possible. Future research
should engage eye tracking and skin conductance
to address these questions.
-
- Second, these effects could be interpreted
as evidence that chil- dren with ASD place
normal social reward value on their interactions
with their parents and reduced social reward
value on unfamiliar others. Research on healthy
adults reveals that one aspect of automatic
facial mimicry is the (unconscious) desire to
affiliate with the target (Lakin &
Chartrand, 2003; Stel & Vonk, 2010).
Meanwhile, previous research on individuals with
ASD and high ASD traits indicate atypical
sensitivity to the social rewards of mimicking
and being mimicked by strangers (Hsu, Neufeld,
& Charkrabati, 2018; Sims et al., 2012).
Although a core symptom of the disorder is
reduced affiliation with others, children with
ASD tend to have typical attachment rates to
their parents (Capps, Sigman, & Mundy, 1994;
Rutgers, Bakermans-Kranenburg, van Ijzendoorn,
& Van Berckelaer-Onnes, 2004). Parents are
presumably sources of reward of many kinds, in
addition to being familiar. In order to
disentangle the effects of familiarity from
those of social reward, future studies should
compare emotional contagion to strangers, to
rewarding familiar adults, and to familiar but
not rewarding adults. Nevertheless, these
results imply that increasing the social reward
value of the target may result in normal
emotional empathy levels among children with
ASD.
-
- Finally, it is possible that multiple
factors are contributing to the current
findings. Emotional contagion is not an
all-or-none phenomenon; familiarity, intensity,
salience, and attention may modulate responses
(Hatfield et al., 1994) just as they do for
other forms of empathy (e.g., Avenanti,
Paluello, Bufalari, & Aglioti, 2006) and
face perception (e.g., Vuilleumier, Aromony,
Driver, & Dolan, 2001). This definition of
emotional empathy involves a representation of
the target's inner state, which auto- matically
activates in the observer a representation of
the observed state. These representations,
unless inhibited, prime associated autonomic and
somatic responses in the observer (Baron-Cohen
& Wheelwright, 2004). Perhaps, rather than
being fully automatic, emotional contagion
involves some form of rapid, nonconscious,
contextual appraisal, and individuals with ASD
have stricter parameters for evaluating an
emotional cue in a manner consistent with a
subsequent empathic response (rather than
inhibiting either the response or the attention
to the emotional cue).
-
- If social signals are uncomfortably
arousing, then perhaps only the above- mentioned
factors are enough to overcome the tendency for
subtle forms of attentional avoidance. Perhaps,
rather than the scope of mirror neuron
functioning being innately specified, mir-
roring processes become automatic by means of a
stream of con- tinuous emotional exchange with
others early in development (Heyes, 2010), and
so a history of impoverished social attention
(due to ASD symptoms) results in a less
efficient and automatic activation of shared
neural representations with others. In other
words, TD individuals may develop an "enactive
mind" (Klin et al., 2003), facilitating
automatic processing of the social signals of
most people most of the time, at least once they
have reached the age of 5. In contrast, children
with ASD, having missed out on an early
developmental milieu consisting of a continuous
stream of emotional contagion (feeling at least
a little bit of what most of their interaction
partners are feeling) may seek out and attend to
a different set of environmental cues as salient
and rewarding, and only automatically
affectively familiar people and certain types of
emotional signals as behaviorally relevant
stimuli, and others only when given explicit
cueing or instructions.
-
- Clinical Implications
- The results of the current study reinforce
that it is crucial to enhance attentional and
motivational salience for children with ASD, in
order to measure their true abilities (i.e., in
order to tease apart what they can do from what
they tend to do); this applies to both
laboratory and educational settings. In
addition, gaining the child's attention and
creating opportunities for affective exchange
may form a particularly important part of
intervention or therapy carried out by
unfamiliar individuals. Although it is always
important for parents to be involved in their
children's therapies no matter what disorder is
being treated, this may be especially so in the
case of children with ASD, who may only show
their true capacity for empathic engagement with
their parents.
-
-
|
