Perception of emotion in musical performance in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

Abstract

Scientific Abstract Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are impaired in understanding the emotional undertones of speech, many of which are communicated through prosody. Musical performance also employs a form of prosody to communicate emotion, and the goal of this study was to examine the ability of adolescents with ASD to understand musical emotion. We designed an experiment in which each musical stimulus served as its own control while we varied the emotional expressivity by manipulating timing and amplitude variation. We asked children and adolescents with ASD and matched controls as well as individuals with Williams syndrome to rate how emotional these excerpts sounded. Results show that children and adolescents with ASD are impaired relative to matched controls and individuals with Williams syndrome at judging the difference in emotionality among the expressivity levels. Implications for theories of emotion in autism are discussed in light of these findings.

Do Communication Disorders Extend to Musical Messages? An Answer from Children with Hearing Loss or Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Because prior research indicates that music can be effective in conveying basic emotions to persons with ASD, clinicians and researchers have hypothesized that music may be both motivating and effective as a therapeutic tool for improving recognition or expression of emotions, communication, and social skill acquisition (e.g., Allen & Heaton, 2010; Boso, Emanuele, Minazzi, Abbamonte & Politi, 2007; Gold, Wigram, & Elefant, 2006; Heaton, Allen, et al, 2008; Kaplan, 2005; Katagiri, 2009; Molnar-Szakacs, et al, 2009). From a methodological perspective, it is of interest that prior studies may have examined fewer or different categories of emotions (Heaton, Hudry, et al, 2008), or may have measured intensity of emotions (Bhatara et al, 2010); further study of all the basic emotions in relation to the ASD population is of interest.…”

Can Music Increase Empathy? Interpreting Musical Experience Through the Empathizing–Systemizing (E-S) Theory: Implications for Autism

“…For example, those with ASC have enhanced accuracy in pitch processing (Heaton, 2003(Heaton, , 2005 and pitch discrimination (Bonnel et al, 2003(Bonnel et al, , 2010. However, adolescents with ASC are less accurate at detecting emotional expressivity in musical performance (Bhatara et al, 2010). Although research has suggested that individuals with ASC do not have deficits in emotional categorization (Quintin, Bhatara, Poissant, Fombonne, & Levitin, 2011), reports of emotional reactivity to music by individuals with ASC are different compared to the general population (Allen, Hill, & Heaton, 2009 (Accordino, Comer, & Heller, 2007).…”

Towards a Crossmodal Exploration of Cognitive Deficits in Psychopathology

“…In view of the repeated description of unimodal emotional decoding deficits in depression, anxiety or anorexia nervosa (e.g. Bhatara et al, 2010;Mendlewicz et al, 2005;Rossignol et al, 2005), it would be interesting to explore the evolution of these deficits in crossmodal settings. Indeed, it might be hypothesized that these psychiatric states will lead, as it has been observed in alcoholdependence, to increased deficits in crossmodal stimulations.…”