Understanding ironic criticism and empathic praise: The role of emotive communication

Agostino, Alba; Im‐Bolter, Nancie; Stefanatos, Arianna K.; Dennis, Maureen

doi:10.1111/bjdp.12155

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Consequently, they may have struggled to appropriately anticipate the emotional responses to the ironic comment. This finding supports previous literature, which has shown impairments in representing the mental states of others in autism [Agostino, Im‐Bolter, Stefanatos, & Dennis, 2017; Baron‐Cohen, Tager‐Flusberg, & Cohen, 1994; Baron‐Cohen, 1997; Frith, 2003; Hamilton, 2009; Happé, 1994; Jolliffe & Baron‐Cohen, 1999; Kapogianni, 2016; Sabbagh, 1999], including intentions (for discussion, see Williams & Happé, 2010). Ideally, this causal relationship would be tested by correlating ToM scores with the reading measures during irony comprehension.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

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

et al. 2020

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Typically developing adults are able to keep track of story characters' emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these processes in autistic adults, since previous research has demonstrated socio‐emotional difficulties among autistic people, which may lead to problems processing irony and its related emotional processes despite an intact ability to integrate language in context. We recorded eye movements from autistic and nonautistic adults while they read narratives in which a character (the victim) was either criticized in an ironic or a literal manner by another character (the protagonist). A target sentence then either described the victim as feeling hurt/amused by the comment, or the protagonist as having intended to hurt/amused the victim by making the comment. Results from the nonautistic adults broadly replicated the key findings from Filik et al., supporting the two‐stage account. Importantly, the autistic adults did not show comparable two‐stage processing of ironic language; they did not differentiate between the emotional responses for victims or protagonists following ironic versus literal criticism. These findings suggest that autistic people experience a specific difficulty taking into account other peoples' communicative intentions (i.e., infer their mental state) to appropriately anticipate emotional responses to an ironic comment. We discuss how these difficulties might link to atypical socio‐emotional processing in autism, and the ability to maintain successful real‐life social interactions. Autism Res 2020, 13: 563–578. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary In line with research showing that autistic people have difficulties considering others' mental states, we found autistic adults were impaired at distinguishing the emotions and intentions experienced by story characters who received sarcastic comments (e.g., “That was fantastic parking” in a context where someone's parking was particularly bad). These findings highlight the difficulties that autistic people experience taking into account other peoples' intentions during communication to appropriately anticipate their emotional responses. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

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

et al. 2020

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“…use ToM) to appropriately anticipate the emotional responses to the ironic comment. This finding supports the previous literature, which has shown impairments in representing the mental state of others in autism (Agostino, Im-Bolter, Stefanatos, & Dennis, 2017;Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 1994;Baron-Cohen, 1997;Frith, 2003;Hamilton, 2009;Happé, 1994;Jolliffe, & Baron-Cohen 1999;Kapogianni, 2016;Sabbagh, 1999), including intentions (for discussion, see Williams & Happé, 2010).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Emotional processing of ironic vs. literal criticism in autistic and non-autistic adults: Evidence from eye-tracking

Barzy¹,

Filik²,

Williams³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Typically developing (TD) adults are able to keep track of story characters’ emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. (2017) showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these processes in autistic adults, since previous research has demonstrated socio-emotional difficulties among autistic people, which may lead to problems processing irony and its related emotional processes despite an intact ability to integrate language in context. We recorded eye movements from autistic and non-autistic adults while they read narratives in which a character (the victim) was either criticised in an ironic or a literal manner by another character (the protagonist). A target sentence then either described the victim as feeling hurt/amused by the comment, or the protagonist as having intended to hurt/amused the victim by making the comment. Results from the non-autistic adults broadly replicated the key findings from Filik et al. (2017), supporting the two-stage account. Importantly, the autistic adults did not show comparable two-stage processing of ironic language; they did not differentiate between the emotional responses for victims or protagonists following ironic vs. literal criticism. These findings suggest that autistic people experience a specific difficulty taking into account other peoples’ communicative intentions (i.e. infer their mental state) to appropriately anticipate emotional responses to an ironic comment. We discuss how these difficulties might link to atypical socio-emotional processing in autism, and the ability to maintain successful real-life social interactions.

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“…The ability to infer other people’s emotions and feelings is designated affective ToM ( Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2009 , 2010 ). Despite the theoretical relationship between comprehension of irony and affective ToM, only one study reported a mediation effect of affective ToM on the relation between age and understanding ironic criticism in school-aged children ( Agostino et al, 2017 ). Although we found an association between affective ToM and irony understanding in patients with schizophrenia, the regression results suggested that affective ToM no longer predict irony performance when controlling the effect of EF.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatic Ability Deficit in Schizophrenia and Associated Theory of Mind and Executive Function

Deng

et al. 2017

Front. Psychol.

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Deficits in pragmatic abilities have frequently been observed in patients with schizophrenia. The objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between pragmatic deficits, ToM deficits and executive dysfunctions in schizophrenia. A group of 42 schizophrenic patients and 42 healthy controls were assessed on irony task (one type of pragmatic language), two subcomponents of ToM (cognitive and affective), and three subcomponents of EF (inhibition, updating, and switching). The clinical symptoms in schizophrenia were assessed using the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. The schizophrenia group exhibited significant impairments in all above tasks compared to the control group. Correlation results found that irony scores were correlated with the two subcomponents of ToM and two of the three subcomponents of EF (inhibition and updating). The regression analysis revealed that the cognitive ToM and inhibition predicted 9.2% and 29.9% of the variance of irony comprehension in the patient group, and inhibition was the best predictor for performance on irony task. Irony understanding was related to positive symptoms, but not to negative symptoms. The results suggest that the ability to interpret pragmatic language depends on schizophrenic patients’ ability to infer mental states and the ability of inhibition. It provides empirical evidence for a particular target of inhibition for rehabilitation and intervention programs developed for schizophrenic patients.

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Understanding ironic criticism and empathic praise: The role of emotive communication

Cited by 9 publications

References 79 publications

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

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

Emotional processing of ironic vs. literal criticism in autistic and non-autistic adults: Evidence from eye-tracking

Pragmatic Ability Deficit in Schizophrenia and Associated Theory of Mind and Executive Function

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