Lee Ka Shu, Long Emily L, Catmur Caroline, Hauser Tobias U, Bird Geoffrey
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford.
Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London.
Emotion. 2024 Dec;24(8):1923-1936. doi: 10.1037/emo0001398. Epub 2024 Jul 25.
Autistic youths tend to react negatively to uncertain events. Little is known about the cognitive processes associated with this intolerance of uncertainty, most notably the tendency to actively gather information to minimize uncertainty. Past research has relied on self-report measures that may not allow investigation of the multifaceted processes associated with intolerance of uncertainty, including information gathering. Alexithymia (difficulties in identifying and describing one's own emotions) commonly co-occurs with autistic traits, but its role in information gathering has rarely been considered. Accordingly, 97 typically developing youths (aged 6-25 years) performed an information gathering task in which they were asked to gather information to infer socioemotional (emotional state) and nonsocial (clothing preference) information about another person when information gathering was costly versus not costly. Dimensional autistic traits were associated with more information gathering regardless of costs and information type. Computational modeling suggested this may be because of the delayed emergence of subjective costs of information gathering in high autistic trait individuals, resulting in later guesses. Alexithymia was uniquely associated with inconsistent emotional responses to rewards and losses and to reduced information gathering about emotional states when assessed using parent-report measures. Future validation in youths diagnosed with autism is warranted to test the generalizability of the findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
患有自闭症的青少年往往对不确定事件产生消极反应。对于与这种不确定性不耐受相关的认知过程，我们知之甚少，尤其是主动收集信息以尽量减少不确定性的倾向。过去的研究依赖于自我报告测量方法，这些方法可能无法探究与不确定性不耐受相关的多方面过程，包括信息收集。述情障碍（难以识别和描述自己的情绪）通常与自闭症特征同时出现，但其在信息收集中的作用很少被考虑。因此，97名发育正常的青少年（年龄在6至25岁之间）完成了一项信息收集任务，在该任务中，当信息收集成本高昂与成本不高时，他们被要求收集信息以推断关于另一个人的社会情感（情绪状态）和非社会（服装偏好）信息。无论成本和信息类型如何，维度自闭症特征都与更多的信息收集相关。计算模型表明，这可能是因为高自闭症特征个体信息收集主观成本的出现延迟，导致猜测较晚。当使用父母报告测量方法进行评估时，述情障碍与对奖励和损失的情绪反应不一致以及减少关于情绪状态的信息收集独特相关。未来有必要在被诊断为自闭症的青少年中进行验证，以检验这些发现的普遍性。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2024美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
