ASD - Social Cognition

Question 1

What is early social cognition focused on?

Answer 1

What develops and when it is developed

Question 2

When is self-awareness prevalent and what occurs?

Answer 2

During the first year, infants can discriminate own limbs or facial expression. Can pass the mirror self recognition test at 18-20 months

Question 3

When do autistic children pass the rouge test?

Answer 3

21-24 months

Question 4

What has autism been linked to?

Answer 4

An impairment in self-awareness

Question 5

What occurs when an ASD child’s self concept is impacted?

Answer 5

Difficult with transition which could lead to emotional distress, feeling of loneliness, anxiety and depression. Joint attention and language and theory of mind impairment

Question 6

What is emotion recognition?

Answer 6

The ability to identify emotions is others - crucial for establishing and maintaining social connections

Question 7

What can typically developing infants do?

Answer 7

Discriminate between images of happy, sad and surprised faces as early as 3 to 4 moths and dynamic displays of happy and sad by 7 months. By 4, the are able to label happy, sad and ager with almost perfect accuracy and become adept to recognising fear and surprise

Question 8

At age 10, what do autistic children show?

Answer 8

Poorer emotion recognition than controls when labelling basic emotions. By 12 and adulthood, some ASD children are no different from typically developing individuals

Question 9

What does alexithymia mean?

Answer 9

Without words for emotions - used to describe a clear of cognitive trait including an inability to identify and describe one’s owns feelings - prevalence estimated in ASD at 50%

Question 10

What do the existing definitions of empathy range from?

Answer 10

Simpler process such as recognition of emotional facial expression and emotion cognition to more complex forms requiring the emphasiser to recognise that their affective states are cause day the emotional state of the empathic target.

Question 11

Are autistic people less empathetic?

Answer 11

After controlling for alexithymia, no differences were found between ASD participants and control sin affect sharing. ASD participants showed lower emotion identification and affective empathy than controls but only offline.

Question 12

What is an impairment in emotion identification like to lead to?

Answer 12

A deficit in affective empathy i.e. if the empathiser doesn’t know what stage the target is in, then it is unlikely that their affective state will match that of the target