Department of Applied Clinical Sciences and Biotechnology, University of L'Aquila, Via Vetoio, Località Coppito, 67100, L'Aquila, Italy.
Reference Regional Centre for Autism, Abruzzo Region Health System, L'Aquila, Italy.
BMC Psychol. 2020 Jul 10;8(1):74. doi: 10.1186/s40359-020-00437-x.
The capacity to evaluate beauty plays a crucial role in social behaviour and social relationships. It is known that some characteristics of beauty are important social cues that can induce stereotypes or promote different behavioural expectations. Another crucial capacity for success in social interactions is empathy, i.e. the ability to understand and share others' mental and emotional states. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have an impairment of empathic ability. We showed in a previous study that empathy and aesthetic perception abilities closely related. Indeed, beauty can affect different aspects of empathic behaviour, and empathy can mediate the aesthetic perception in typically developing (TD) individuals. Thus, this study evaluates the ability of aesthetic perception in ASD individuals compared to TD individuals, using the Golden Beauty behavioural task adapted for eye-tracking in order to acquire both explicit and implicit evidences. In both groups, the relationship between empathic and aesthetic perception abilities was also evaluated.
Ten ASD individuals (age ± SD:20.7 ± 4.64) and ten TD individuals (age ± SD:20.17 ± 0.98) participated in the study. Participants underwent empathy tasks and then the Golden Beauty task. To assess differences in the participants' performance, we carried out a repeated measures general linear model.
At the explicit level, our behavioural results show an impairment in aesthetic perception ability in ASD individuals. This inability could have relevance for their ability to experience pleasure during social interactions. However, at the implicit level (eye-tracking results), ASD individuals conserved a good ability to feel aesthetic pleasure during the Golden Beauty task, thus indicating a discrepancy between the explicit and implicit evaluation of the beauty task. Finally, beauty perception appears to be linked to empathy when neither of these capacities is compromised, as demonstrated in the TD group. In contrast, this link is missed in ASD individuals.
Overall, our results clearly show that individuals with autism are not completely blind to aesthetic pleasure: in fact, they retain an implicit ability to experience beauty. These findings could pave the way for the development of new protocols to rehabilitate ASD social functioning, exploiting their conserved implicit aesthetic perception.
评估美的能力在社交行为和人际关系中起着至关重要的作用。众所周知，美的某些特征是重要的社交线索，可以引起刻板印象或促进不同的行为期望。成功进行社交互动的另一个关键能力是同理心，即理解和分享他人的心理和情绪状态的能力。自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者的同理心能力受损。我们在之前的一项研究中表明，同理心和审美感知能力密切相关。事实上，美可以影响同理心行为的不同方面，同理心可以在典型发育（TD）个体中调节审美感知。因此，本研究使用适应眼动追踪的 Golden Beauty 行为任务评估 ASD 个体与 TD 个体的审美感知能力，以获得明确和隐含的证据。在这两个组中，还评估了同理心和审美感知能力之间的关系。
十名 ASD 个体（年龄±SD：20.7±4.64）和十名 TD 个体（年龄±SD：20.17±0.98）参与了这项研究。参与者接受了同理心任务，然后进行了 Golden Beauty 任务。为了评估参与者表现的差异，我们进行了重复测量的一般线性模型。
在明确的水平上，我们的行为结果表明 ASD 个体的审美感知能力受损。这种无能可能与其在社交互动中体验愉悦的能力有关。然而，在隐含水平（眼动追踪结果）上，ASD 个体在 Golden Beauty 任务中保留了良好的感受审美愉悦的能力，因此表明在对美的任务进行明确和隐含评估之间存在差异。最后，在没有这些能力受损的情况下，美感感知与同理心相关，正如 TD 组所证明的那样。相比之下，这种联系在 ASD 个体中缺失。
总体而言，我们的结果清楚地表明，自闭症患者并非完全对审美愉悦视而不见：事实上，他们保留了体验美的隐含能力。这些发现为开发利用他们保留的隐含审美感知来康复 ASD 社交功能的新方案铺平了道路。
