University College London, UK.
University of California San Francisco, USA.
Autism. 2021 Jul;25(5):1321-1334. doi: 10.1177/1362361320987950. Epub 2021 Jan 22.
More research has been conducted on how autistic people understand and interpret other people's emotions, than on how autistic people experience their own emotions. The experience of emotion is important however, because it can relate to difficulties like anxiety and depression, which are common in autism. In neurotypical adults and children, different emotions have been associated with unique maps of activity patterns in the body. Whether these maps of emotion are comparable in autism is currently unknown. Here, we asked 100 children and adolescents, 45 of whom were autistic, to color in outlines of the body to indicate how they experienced seven emotions. Autistic adults and children sometimes report differences in how they experience their internal bodily states, termed interoception, and so we also investigated how this related to the bodily maps of emotion. In this study, the autistic children and adolescents had comparable interoception to the non-autistic children and adolescents, but there was less variability in their maps of emotion. In other words, they showed more similar patterns of activity across the different emotions. This was not related to interoception, however. This work suggests that there are differences in how autistic people experience emotion that are not explained by differences in interoception. In neurotypical people, less variability in emotional experiences is linked to anxiety and depression, and future work should seek to understand if this is a contributing factor to the increased prevalence of these difficulties in autism.
相比研究自闭症患者如何理解和解释他人的情绪，人们对自闭症患者如何体验自身情绪的研究还比较少。然而，情绪体验很重要，因为它可能与焦虑和抑郁等常见于自闭症的困难有关。在神经典型的成年人和儿童中，不同的情绪与身体活动模式的独特图谱相关。这些情绪图谱在自闭症中是否具有可比性目前尚不清楚。在这里，我们要求 100 名儿童和青少年（其中 45 名患有自闭症）用身体轮廓来表示他们经历七种情绪的方式。自闭症的成年人和儿童有时会报告他们体验内部身体状态的方式（称为内感受）存在差异，因此我们还研究了这与情绪的身体图谱有何关系。在这项研究中，自闭症儿童和青少年的内感受与非自闭症儿童和青少年相当，但他们的情绪图谱的可变性较小。换句话说，他们在不同情绪之间表现出更相似的活动模式。然而，这与内感受无关。这项工作表明，自闭症患者体验情绪的方式存在差异，这些差异不能用内感受的差异来解释。在神经典型人群中，情绪体验的可变性较小与焦虑和抑郁有关，未来的研究应该试图了解这是否是自闭症中这些困难发生率增加的一个因素。
