Intact counterfactual emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder: Evidence from eye-tracking

Abstract

Counterfactual emotions, such as regret and relief, require an awareness of how things could have been different. We report a pre-registered experiment that examines the real-time understanding of counterfactual emotions in adults with and without ASD, based on research showing that the developmental trajectory of counterfactual thinking may be disrupted in people with ASD. Participants were eye-tracked as they read narratives in which a character made an explicit decision then subsequently experienced either a mildly negative or positive outcome. The final sentence in each story included an explicit remark about the character’s mood that was either consistent or inconsistent with the character’s expected feelings of regret or relief (e.g. “… she feels happy/annoyed about her decision.”). Results showed that adults with ASD are unimpaired in understanding emotions based on counterfactual reasoning, and in fact showed earlier sensitivity to inconsistencies within relief contexts compared to TD participants. This finding highlights a previously unknown strength in empathy and emotion processing in adults with ASD, which may have been masked in previous research that has typically relied on explicit, response-based measures to record emotional inferences, which are likely to be susceptible to demand characteristics and response biases. This study therefore highlights the value of employing implicit measures that provide insights on peoples’ immediate responses to emotional content without disrupting ongoing processing.

Emotional Processing of Ironic Versus Literal Criticism in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults: Evidence From Eye‐Tracking

“…Finally, our experiment revealed group differences in overall reading time, with adults in the autistic group incurring longer regression path reading times and making more regressions out from the critical and precritical regions compared to the TD control group. This pattern adds to the fairly consistent finding from eye‐tracking research to date, suggesting that autistic people employ a more cautious reading strategy, and are more likely to re‐read text to verify understanding of the intended meaning [Au‐Yeung et al, 2015; Black et al, 2018, 2019; Ferguson et al, 2019; Howard et al, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Sansosti, Was, Rawson, & Remaklus, 2013]. A similar pattern has been reported in neuroimaging research, which suggests that autistic individuals show traces of hyper‐lexicality, meaning that they focus more on the meaning of words and individual sentences and less on using mental imagery to build a coherent representation of discourse while processing discourse online [Just, Cherkassky, Keller, & Minshew, 2004].…”

“…Hence, the final sample included 49 participants, specifically, 25 autistic adults and 24 TD adults, which is consistent with our preregistered target sample size. This sample size was chosen a priori based on the sample size used in each experiment in Filik et al [2017; N = 28], and to be comparable or even exceed the sample sizes used in previous research that has examined eye movements in reading in autistic and TD adults [e.g., Au‐Yeung et al, 2015; Black et al, 2018, 2019; Ferguson et al, 2019; Howard et al, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c].…”

“…Results revealed an intact ability to comprehend irony in autistic participants, who used context to infer a nonliteral meaning for ironic passages, albeit at a slower rate than the TD controls. Similarly, Black, Barzy, Williams, and Ferguson [2019] found that autistic adults were unimpaired, or even enhanced, in tracking a story character's emotions based on that character's goals and actions (i.e., counterfactual emotions, regret and relief) compared to TD participants. Thus, these online studies suggest that autistic adults can understand basic irony, and are able to infer complex emotions for characters in a story.…”

“…The current study makes an important contribution to this literature as it tests how autistic adults process the emotional responses to irony in real‐time, thus combining the questions addressed independently in Au‐Yeung et al [2015] and Black et al [2019]. Moreover, our study is the first to examine whether/how autistic adults will track multiple story characters' perspectives in a story to distinguish the emotional intentions and responses experienced by a protagonist or victim, respectively.…”

Autistic adults anticipate and integrate meaning based on the speaker’s voice: Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials.

“…These findings suggest that subtle differences may exist in the speed with which context is accessed and influences language processing in autism (c.f. Black, Barzy, Williams, & Ferguson, 2019;.…”