In contrast to their performance within social and interpersonal domains, children with autistic disorders showed no deficits in processing affect in musical stimuli.

Background. The results from recent studies suggest that alexithymia, a disorder characterized by impairments in understanding personal experiences of emotion, is frequently co-morbid with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the extent that alexithymia is associated with primary deficits in recognizing external emotional cues, characteristic in ASD, has yet to be determined.Method. Twenty high-functioning adults with ASD and 20 age-and intelligence-matched typical controls categorized vocal and verbal expressions of emotion and completed an alexithymia assessment.Results. Emotion recognition scores in the ASD group were significantly poorer than in the control group and performance was influenced by the severity of alexithymia and the psycho-acoustic complexity of the presented stimuli. For controls, the effect of complexity was significantly smaller than for the ASD group, although the association between total emotion recognition scores and alexithymia was still strong.Conclusions. Higher levels of alexithymia in the ASD group accounted for some, but not all, of the group difference in emotion recognition ability. However, alexithymia was insufficient to explain the different sensitivities of the two groups to the effects of psycho-acoustic complexity on performance. The results showing strong associations between emotion recognition and alexithymia scores in controls suggest a potential explanation for variability in emotion recognition in non-clinical populations.

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A B S T R A C TSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 highfunctioning adults on the autism spectrum, in order to examine the nature of their personal experiences of music. Consistent with the literature on typically developing people's engagement with music, the analysis showed that most participants exploit music for a wide range of purposes in the cognitive, emotional and social domains, including mood management, personal development and social inclusion. However, in contrast to typically developing people, the ASD group's descriptions of mood states reflected a greater reliance on internally focused (arousal) rather than externally focused (emotive) language. A D D R E S SCorrespondence should be addressed to: RO RY A L L E N , Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, Over the last two decades, an increasing number of experimental studies have explored an association between autism and absolute pitch, autism and savant skills in music, and autistic traits in musicians with absolute pitch (Bonnel et al., 2003; Brown et al., 2003; Heaton, 2003; Heaton and Wallace, 2004; Heaton et al., 1998;1999b;2007; Mottron et al., 1999; Nettelbeck and Young, 1996; Treffert, 1988; Young and Nettlebeck, 1995). However, many of these studies report findings from prespecified subgroups of individuals, test specific components of music (e.g. absolute pitch), and do not therefore throw light on the nature of musical experience in the wider ASD population.Experimental findings that generalize to broader populations of individuals with ASD have explored sensitivity to emotion in music. For example, Heaton et al. (1999a) showed that children with ASD understood the affective connotations of musical mode sufficiently well to be able to pair schematic representations of happy and sad faces with extracts of music in major and minor keys. In a more recent investigation (Heaton et al., 2008), typically developing 4-to 10-year-old children, children and adolescents with Down syndrome and those with ASD matched musical extracts with pictures denoting a range of affective and non-affective scenarios; unimpaired performance was again noted in the ASD group. However, a limitation of both of these designs is that they specifically tested the ability to make conventional musical associations, and provided only limited insights into the nature of the participants' personal experience of music.Other, non-experimental, investigations into the broader impact of music in people with autism have explored the value of music in a therapeutic context. Recent studies (Boso et al., 2007; Kern et al., 2007) have shown benefits, and a meta-analysis (Whipple, 2004) claimed that music therapy is demonstrably effective in improving the condition of children and adolescents with autism. For example, Wigram and Gold (2006, pp. 540-1) found some evidence of positive effect on interpersonal communication, reciprocity and relationship-building skills. However, a number of methodological criticisms hav...

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Findings from several studies have suggested that deaf children have difficulties with emotion identification and that these may impact upon social skills. The authors of these studies have typically attributed such problems to delayed language acquisition and/or opportunity to converse about personal experiences with other people (Peterson & Siegal, 1995, 1998). The current study aimed to investigate emotion identification in children with varying levels of deafness by specifically testing their ability to recognize perceptual aspects of emotions depicted in upright or inverted human and cartoon faces. The findings from the study showed that, in comparison with both chronological- and mental-age-matched controls, the deaf children were significantly worse at identifying emotions. However, like controls, their performance decreased when emotions were presented on the inverted faces, thus indexing a typical configural processing style. No differences were found across individuals with different levels of deafness or in those with and without signing family members. The results are supportive of poor emotional identification in hearing-impaired children and are discussed in relation to delays in language acquisition and intergroup differences in perceptual processing.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum in order to examine the nature of their personal experiences of music. The analysis showed that most participants exploit music for a wide range of purposes in the cognitive, emotional and social domains, but the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) group's descriptions of mood states reflected a greater reliance on internally focused (arousal) rather than externally focused (emotive) language, when compared with studies of typically developing individuals.

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