3.3 Flashcards
Children with autism have difficulties identifying
their own emotions and less developed emotion concepts (which causes an impaired capacity to differentiate between one’s emotions within the negative spectrum).
Why are autists bad at making self-evaluation?
No theory of mind
can only make broad statements about emotions
rather than being less emotional than other children..
autistic children don’t fully appreciate a communicative value of emotional expression
Emotional Awareness
Autists have an emotional state, but monitoring includes the detection of bodily ad behavioral signals in combination with the evaluation of the actual situation. Even e.g. labeling an emotion requires this combination. Cognitive emotion theories hold that next to physical signals we become aware of a primitive action tendency; e.g. fears reveals itself by the tendency to run away. Interpretation is therefore based on a cognitive post hoc analysis that links primary emotional reactions to situational circumstances. people are autonomic organisms that express their relation to the outside world by thoughts and feelings.
TOM in emotional awareness
Theory of mind stresses that people make a personal representation of the objective world. Without such a representational conception it is not you that is afraid of the dog, but the dog that is scary; this is a subtle difference that can have large implications, for instance in the realm of emotion regulation strategies.
Autists abilities in emotion understanding and limitation
1)
-the link between the four basic emotions fear, anger, happiness, sadness and their eliciting events
-able to give descriptions of various emotions but their examples less often referred to social interactions
2)
Often multiple Emotions in the same situation; various emotion perspectives; same valence as well as opposite valence. Acknowledgement of mixed emotions clearly asks for a higher level of emotional awareness and ability to regard a situation from different perspectives need a theory of mind.
Differences and sim for Aut and Control for vignettes
- Negative emotions were reported less frequently by children with autism.
- Happiness same for both. Children with autism made fewer references to specific situations than controls.
- Children with autism provided fewer social examples than controls.
- No difference in emotion intensity.
- Children with autism identified fewer different emotional perspectives per story.
Assumptions about aut abilities of emotion detection
- children with autism are equally as good as the control group at detecting emotions of an opposite valence within one scenario but not in detecting emotions of the same valence
- accept the possibility of opposite perspectives
- for the 3 sources, autists neglect emotional information signaled from others
- Inexpressiveness lead to less feedback from enviornment
- Bad at distinguishing emotions on the basis of their own experience
3 sources of emotion concepts in normal children
self-monitoring, the observation of others and the information pro- vided by the (verbal) community
Assumptions about emotional awareness in aut
Awareness problems in autists seem to be limited to labelling their emotional reactions, they are equally well able to discriminate between different levels of intensity.
Children with autism more often claimed not to feel an emotion, were
less able to generate emotionally charged situations from their own experiences, provided fewer emotionally charged social situations, and acknowledged fewer different emotional perspectives.
Assumed more prevalent emotion in autists
Fear. This might be a reason for autist’s difficulty to get a grip on the social world and could also explain the total absence of social examples among the children with autism.
