Kim Kwanguk, Rosenthal M Zachary, Gwaltney Mary, Jarrold William, Hatt Naomi, McIntyre Nancy, Swain Lindsay, Solomon Marjorie, Mundy Peter
School of Education, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2015 Dec;45(12):3891-9. doi: 10.1007/s10803-014-2036-7.
A new virtual reality task was employed which uses preference for interpersonal distance to social stimuli to examine social motivation and emotion perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Nineteen high function children with higher functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) and 23 age, gender, and IQ matched children with typical development (TD) used a joy stick to position themselves closer or further from virtual avatars while attempting to identify six emotions expressed by the avatars, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise that were expressed at different levels of intensity. The results indicated that children with HFASD displayed significantly less approach behavior to the positive happy expression than did children with TD, who displayed increases in approach behavior to higher intensities of happy expressions. Alternatively, all groups tended to withdraw from negative emotions to the same extent and there were no diagnostic group differences in accuracy of recognition of any of the six emotions. This pattern of results is consistent with theory that suggests that some children with HFASD display atypical social-approach motivation, or sensitivity to the positive reward value of positive social-emotional events. Conversely, there was little evidence that a tendency to withdraw from social-emotional stimuli, or a failure to process social emotional stimuli, was a component of social behavior task performance in this sample of children with HFASD.
采用了一项新的虚拟现实任务，该任务利用对社交刺激人际距离的偏好来研究自闭症谱系障碍儿童的社交动机和情绪感知。19名高功能自闭症谱系障碍（HFASD）儿童和23名年龄、性别及智商匹配的发育正常（TD）儿童，在试图识别虚拟化身所表达的六种情绪（幸福、恐惧、愤怒、厌恶、悲伤和惊讶，且这些情绪以不同强度表达）时，使用操纵杆来调整自己与虚拟化身的距离，使其更近或更远。结果表明，与TD儿童相比，HFASD儿童对积极的快乐表情表现出的趋近行为明显更少，而TD儿童对更高强度的快乐表情的趋近行为会增加。另外，所有组对负面情绪的回避程度趋于相同，并且在识别这六种情绪中的任何一种时，诊断组之间没有差异。这种结果模式与理论一致，该理论认为一些HFASD儿童表现出非典型的社交趋近动机，或对积极社交情感事件的积极奖励价值敏感。相反，几乎没有证据表明从社交情感刺激中退缩的倾向或处理社交情感刺激的失败是该HFASD儿童样本社交行为任务表现的一个组成部分。
