Using and Reasoning about Social Strategies in ASD (Summary)

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Bellesi, G., Jameel, L., Vyas, K., Crawford, S., & Channon, S. (2016). Using and reasoning about social strategies in autism spectrum disorder in everyday situations. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 25, 112-121.

I have read access to this but not download access, so I'll try to summarize the article the best I can.

University students with and without ASD were asked an "awkward question" and then the strategies they used to answer the question were analyzed. Per the abstract, students with ASD used a more negative emotional tone when responding.

They start out the article defining autism as a disorder with "cognitive empathy deficits" which they define as "the ability to take others' perspectives." They say that it is unclear if emotional empathy, which they define as "the ability to resonate emotionally with others" is intact with autistics. The authors say that autistic people appear to have the same ability to judge the mental states of others as do non-autistics.

They cite a recent study that adolescents on the spectrum did not differ from NT adolescents when picking from a range of different social interactions and judging their appropriateness, but stated that the autistic adolescents gave "less sophisticated" justifications for their answers.

"The present study aimed to extend our understanding of impaired vs. preserved aspects of everyday social functioning by examining both the nature of the strategies that high-functioning adults with ASD use to manage everyday social situations."

They used 19 students with ASD and 19 controls. Each group had 13 males and 6 females. They were all aged between 18 and 30, and all had a WTAR standard reading score of 85 or above. The researchers excluded people with learning disabilities and brain injuries.

They read 10 vignettes involving social situations and a main character. At the end of each vignette, the reading asks the reader to give an opinion. The character's questions were designed to be socially awkward. The readers had to state what they would say to the character's questions and then rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how awkward the situation was. The participants verbally gave their answers, which was then written down verbatim by the researcher.

Example scenario: "Your cousin likes to come and stay with you. She is good company, but when she visits she expects you to pay to take her out to expensive places. She asks, 'Can I come and visit you next weekend?'"

And then the participant is asked "What would you say in this situation?"
And then they asked, "Please rank-order the following types of answers to the character's questions from the most to the least appropriate." (a, agree; b, to suggest a compromise based on a polite excuse, and so on)
THEN they asked, "Why might people choose a?"

Results
Most of the time, the NT participants gave "sophisticated" answers. Most of the time the autistic participants gave "non-sophisticated" answers.
"Sophisticated" answers were one of these four types:
1-qualification with excuse
2-justification with excuse
3-qualification with factual feedback
4-justification with factual feedback
"Non-sophisticated" was not explicitly defined, but it looks to me that it was a simple yes or no answer, supposedly without a lie made up to protect the other person's feelings.

It says the ASD group scored significantly lower in "emotional tone" and "less courteous" than the control group, but it didn't say anywhere how they measured this. It could have been the words they chose, how they said they felt, or their tone of voice as perceived by the researchers. I wish it said.

The perceived awkwardness was the same with both groups. That is important. It was expected that the ASD group would find the situations more awkward.

The authors concluded: "[T]hose with ASD appeared to lack either ability or inclination to consider the characters spontaneously in their reasoning, unless cued to do so."

My take: The paper didn't have enough information in it. I wish I could download it so that I could read it more carefully and perhaps email the authors to ask questions. I might do that anyway. As to the conclusion...I wonder if NTs care about fictional characters more than autistic people do. The fact that the people in the situations weren't real could be an effect.