Different Aspects of Emotional Awareness in Relation to Motor Cognition and Autism Traits

Abstract

Emotion is inherently embodied, formulated through bodily sensation, as well as expressed and regulated through action. Both expressing one’s own emotions and understanding the emotional actions of others are common areas of difficulty in autism. Moreover, reduced emotional awareness is also thought to be problematic in autism, and such difficulties may be mediated by impaired motor cognition. We aimed to examine how intensity of emotional experience and ability to differentiate between one’s own emotions relates to motor empathy and autistic traits. We hypothesized that greater motor cognition would be associated with greater emotional intensity and more refined emotion differentiation. Participants from the general population (N = 160) completed the Actions and Feelings Questionnaire (AFQ), a self-report measure assessing motor cognition, alongside the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire and an emotion elicitation task. Motor cognition was significantly associated with more intense emotional experiences but not with ability to differentiate between similar emotions. Autistic traits, particularly social aloofness, predicted less emotion differentiation and lower scores on the animation subscale of the AFQ. We suggest that whereas as intensity of experience may be dependent on sensorimotor representation of emotions, differentiation requires additional cognitive functions such as language understanding. A dissociation between awareness of intensity and differentiation may be critical for understanding emotional difficulties in autism.

Self-compassion as a mediator of the association between autistic traits and depressive/anxious symptomatology

“…Research on emotion differentiation has found that autistic and non-autistic individuals with elevated autistic traits make less subtle distinctions between negative emotions than do neurotypical individuals (Erbas et al, 2013; Huggins et al, 2019). Emotion differentiation refers to the ability to make fine-grained, nuanced distinctions between similar emotions, with lower emotion differentiation linked to poorer well-being (Smidt & Suvak, 2015).…”

Autistic traits predict underestimation of emotional abilities.

“…PED-Task outcomes have been partially reported in another publication (Huggins et al, 2019), so we do not want to report them here. The only outcome of interest is that neither negative, r (87) = −.085, p = .428, nor positive, r (82) = −.003, p = .978, differentiation significantly correlated with total inconsistency scores.…”

“…Participants also completed a version of the PED-task (Erbas et al, 2014), the results of which are included in another publication (Huggins, Cameron, & Williams, 2019) and thus will not be elaborated on in detail here. The only outcome of interest for the PED-task was emotion differentiation scores, reflecting how well participants differentiated between similar emotional states.…”

Translation, Cross-Cultural Adaptation, and Validation of a Dutch Version of the Actions and Feelings Questionnaire in Autistic and Neurotypical Adults

“…Additionally, while we showed convergent validity for the AFQ-NL in the neurotypical population, no correlation between AFQ and AQ was found in the ASC population. The originally reported correlation between AFQ and autistic traits was found in neurotypicals (Huggins et al, 2019) and we expected that correlation to extend to ASC individuals. However, AQ may not have been the best variable to calculate convergent validity for the ASC population.…”