| 1. |
- Silva, Catarina, et al.
(författare)
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Acting on observed social exclusion and pro-social behaviour in autism spectrum disorder
- 2020
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Ingår i: Autism. - : SAGE Publications. - 1362-3613 .- 1461-7005. ; 24:1, s. 233-245
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Humans are commonly motivated towards cooperation and prosociality. In this study, we examined this motivational predisposition in autistic individuals. Using an adaptation of the Cyberball paradigm, we investigated subsequent pro-social behaviour after witnessing social exclusion. Participants witnessed and played a series of Cyberball games, rated their affective state and valued emotional faces with respect to their approachability. Results showed that participants from both groups were aware of the social exclusion. However, while neurotypically developing participants engaged in pro-social behaviour in reaction to the exclusion, autistic participants showed less alterations, in terms of either behaviour or affective state. The current findings suggest a distinct motivational drive and processing of social reward stimuli in autism, which may result in behavioural responses divergent from typical development when engaging in the social world.
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| 2. |
- Silva, Catarina, et al.
(författare)
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Attachment style impacts behavior and early oculomotor response to positive, but not negative, pictures
- 2015
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. - : Wiley. - 0036-5564 .- 1467-9450. ; 56:3, s. 327-334
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The present study investigated whether oculomotor behavior is influenced by attachment styles. The Relationship Scales Questionnaire was used to assess attachment styles of forty-eight voluntary university students and to classify them into attachment groups (secure, preoccupied, fearful, and dismissing). Eye-tracking was recorded while participants engaged in a 3-seconds free visual exploration of stimuli presenting either a positive or a negative picture together with a neutral picture, all depicting social interactions. The task consisted in identifying whether the two pictures depicted the same emotion. Results showed that the processing of negative pictures was impermeable to attachment style, while the processing of positive pictures was significantly influenced by individual differences in insecure attachment. The groups highly avoidant regarding to attachment (dismissing and fearful) showed reduced accuracy, suggesting a higher threshold for recognizing positive emotions compared to the secure group. The groups with higher attachment anxiety (preoccupied and fearful) showed differences in automatic capture of attention, in particular an increased delay preceding the first fixation to a picture of positive emotional valence. Despite lenient statistical thresholds induced by the limited sample size of some groups (p < 0.05 uncorrected for multiple comparisons), the current findings suggest that the processing of positive emotions is affected by attachment styles. These results are discussed within a broader evolutionary framework.
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| 3. |
- Silva, Catarina, et al.
(författare)
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Seeing the funny side of things : Humour processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders
- 2017
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Ingår i: Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders. - : Elsevier BV. - 1750-9467 .- 1878-0237. ; 43-44, s. 8-17
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background Humour is fundamentally a social phenomenon, occurring frequently in social and playful contexts. The positive affect resulting from an experience of enjoyed humour makes it socially rewarding. A lack of sense of humour has been associated with individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), however, the existing literature is sparse and inconclusive. In this study, we investigated implicit and explicit humour understanding and appreciation in ASD. Method Specifically, an implicit item-item associative task was used, in which participants saw neutral-humorous and neutral-neutral sequences of two pictures in an encoding phase. Following a filler task, sequence recognition was measured in a yes/no test phase. At the end of the task, explicit measures of humour understanding and appreciation were completed by the participants, who rated the picture sequences for humour appreciation and funniness. Results Results revealed that, at an explicit level, participants with ASD were able to enjoy and understand the humorous stimuli as much as typically developing (TD) participants. At an implicit level, however, the results suggest that humour processing may be specially content-dependent in ASD. Fine-grained analysis on task performance indeed showed an altered humorous processing for social, but not for non-social humorous content in the ASD group, while that was not the case for the TD group. Conclusions These results suggest that participants with ASD may be distinctively motivated to attend to social reward cues such as social humorous stimuli. These findings are discussed within the social motivation hypothesis framework.
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