Davidson Denise, Sawyer Brooke, Kiessel Camilla
Department of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
School of Education, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2025 Aug 23. doi: 10.1007/s10803-025-07021-5.
In the present study, we asked autistic and non-autistic children to recount personally experienced basic (fear, happiness, sadness) and self-conscious (guilt, pride, embarrassment) emotions. Using linguistic analyses, children's recounts were examined in order to gain new insights into their understanding of these emotions.
Children were asked to recount personally experienced basic and self-conscious emotions. Discourse and content analyses were performed on their responses.
For basic emotions, autistic and non-autistic children's recounts did not differ in terms of number of responses provided following two requests, length of responses (i.e., number of verb and argument clauses in recounts), and the number of prompts needed to elicit basic emotion recounts. Moreover, children did not differ in the appropriateness of their recounts of basic emotions, although autistic children made fewer causal inferences about sadness than their non-autistic peers. In contrast, autistic children offered significantly fewer recounts of guilt and embarrassment and provided briefer recounts of guilt compared to their non-autistic peers. Autistic children also made fewer references to others in their recounts for guilt and embarrassment and were less likely to include social context information (i.e. references to others). Finally, autism symptomatology predicted appropriateness of content for guilt and pride, whereas vocabulary level predicted appropriateness of content for sadness and embarrassment.
Few linguistic differences were found in children's recounting of basic emotions, whereas autistic children showed less appropriate content for self-conscious emotions. Implications of our findings in terms of possible avenues for intervention and training are given.
在本研究中，我们要求自闭症儿童和非自闭症儿童讲述个人经历的基本情绪（恐惧、快乐、悲伤）和自我意识情绪（内疚、自豪、尴尬）。通过语言分析对儿童的讲述进行研究，以便对他们对这些情绪的理解获得新的认识。
要求儿童讲述个人经历的基本情绪和自我意识情绪。对他们的回答进行话语和内容分析。
对于基本情绪，自闭症儿童和非自闭症儿童在以下两方面的讲述没有差异：两个问题提出后提供的回答数量、回答的长度（即讲述中动词和论据从句的数量）以及引出基本情绪讲述所需的提示数量。此外，儿童在基本情绪讲述的恰当性方面没有差异，尽管自闭症儿童对悲伤做出的因果推断比非自闭症同龄人少。相比之下，自闭症儿童讲述内疚和尴尬情绪的次数明显较少，并且与非自闭症同龄人相比，讲述内疚情绪时内容更简短。自闭症儿童在讲述内疚和尴尬情绪时提及他人的次数也较少，并且不太可能包含社会背景信息（即提及他人）。最后，自闭症症状预测了内疚和自豪情绪内容的恰当性，而词汇水平预测了悲伤和尴尬情绪内容的恰当性。
在儿童讲述基本情绪方面几乎没有发现语言差异，而自闭症儿童在自我意识情绪方面的内容不太恰当。给出了我们的研究结果在可能的干预和训练途径方面的启示。
