Emotion-related and abstract concepts in autistic people: evidence from the British Picture Vocabulary Scale.

Autistic and nonautistic retarded adolescents and young adults, individually matched for chronological age and performance on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS; Dunn, Dunn, & Whetton, 1982), were compared on those items of the BPVS that independent raters judged (a) emotion-related and (b) highly abstract. Compared to control subjects, autistic individuals scored lower on emotion-related vis-à-vis emotion-unrelated items, an effect that could not be attributed to the "social content" of the items. However, autistic and nonautistic subjects achieved similar scores when responding to highly abstract vis-à-vis "concrete" words of the BPVS. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have specific impairments in grasping emotion-related concepts. They also suggest the need for further study of autistic and nonautistic retarded subjects' difficulties in abstracting. The results have a bearing on the interpretation of the BPVS and on the use of this test as a matching procedure.