Mental State Understanding and Moral Judgment in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder

Moral Agency, Rules, and Temporality in People Who Are Diagnosed With Mild Forms of Autism: In Defense of a Sentimentalist View

The origin of moral agency is a much-debated issue. While rationalists or Kantians have argued that moral agency is rooted in reason, sentimentalists or Humeans have ascribed its origin to empathic feelings. This debate between rationalists and sentimentalists still stands with respect to persons with mental disorders, such as individuals diagnosed with mild forms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), without intellectual impairment. Individuals with ASD are typically regarded as moral agents, however their ability for empathy remains debated. The goal of this paper is to investigate the mechanisms of moral actions in people with ASD, by finding arguments for the origin of their moral actions, supporting either the sentimentalist or the rationalist view of the dispute. We propose to revisit the debate using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to study the autobiographies of individuals with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) and Asperger Syndrome (AS). While conducting the systematic analysis of 10 autobiographies, we re-examined both the rationalist and the sentimentalist positions, considering the links between empathic feelings and moral agency. The investigation of the temporal dimensions of emotional experiences, an aspect overlooked by previous research, indicated that individuals with ASD empathize with others, but in different ways as compared to neurotypicals. A relationship between emotional experience and the type of moral agency exhibited by individuals with forms of ASD was established. As a consequence, our analyses support the sentimentalist stance on moral action.

Adopting the Concept of ‘Ba' and the ‘SECI' Model in Developing Person-Centered Practices in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services

The concept of knowledge is divided into explicit and tacit knowledge; explicit knowledge refers to the knowledge that can be articulated, written and stored, while tacit knowledge refers to personal experiences, values, beliefs and emotions of an individual. By Nonaka's theory, explicit and tacit knowledge do not lie separately but interact together by interactions and relationships between human beings. Thus, the SECI model is based on the assumption that knowledge is created through the social interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge; known as knowledge conversion. The SECI model is based upon four modes of knowledge conversion; socialization, externalization, combination and internalization. 'Ba' is considered to be a shared platform for knowledge creation. 'Ba' is a shared space, be it physical, mental or a combination of both that serves as a foundation of knowledge creation. Ba involves sharing of tacit knowledge i.e. emotions, feelings, experiences and mental images. It also involves the formation of a collective relationship which is open to the sharing of practices, values, processes and culture. This concept focuses mainly on the individual as a person who holds the knowledge rather than just on the knowledge itself. It aims to create a common space to bring people together where they can dialogue to share and create knowledge. As in the relationships formed in person-centered practices, relationships formed in Ba are based on not just the sharing of objective knowledge but also on sharing values, beliefs, and emotions. It also reflects the formation of a person-centered environment as a basis for person-centered research where healthful relationships with the participants are formed. Furthermore, Ba will aid in creating a sense of connectiveness and dialogue, thus focusing on the idea that the development of new practices is done with others rather than to others. In this article we will discuss how these Eastern concepts can be adapted and used to develop person-centered practices within child and adolescent mental health services, specifically related to rehabilitation and recovery. The concepts of personhood will be discussed, followed by a reflection on current practices adopted when working with children and adolescents.

Autistic traits and gender modulate emotion changes before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show an enhanced response to stressors, and gender plays an important role in stress response. Thus, autistic traits (ATs) in the general population and gender may regulate the emotion changes before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the present study, participants were divided into higher and lower ATs groups. The generalized linear models were used to estimate the effects of the independent variables (e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic status (before, during), gender (male, female), and AT groups (higher ATs, lower ATs) and their interactions on emotions measured by the Positive and Negative Affect scales. The results showed that the COVID-19 pandemic reduced positive emotions and increased fear and anger. Furthermore, compared with the status before the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals with higher ATs and females experienced stronger anger and fear than individuals with lower ATs and males during the pandemic. The present study revealed the emotional impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and greater emotional susceptibility to the pandemic among individuals with higher ATs and females. Our findings provide prospective evidence for understanding the ASD/ATs-related enhanced response to pathogen threat-related stressors and have implications for COVID-19 crisis interventions.

Right Temporoparietal Junction Underlies Avoidance of Moral Transgression in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by a core difference in theory-of-mind (ToM) ability, which extends to alterations in moral judgment and decision-making. Although the function of the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), a key neural marker of ToM and morality, is known to be atypical in autistic individuals, the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying its specific changes in moral decision-making remain unclear. Here, we addressed this question by using a novel fMRI task together with computational modeling and representational similarity analysis (RSA). ASD participants and healthy control subjects (HCs) decided in public or private whether to incur a personal cost for funding a morally good cause (Good Context) or receive a personal gain for benefiting a morally bad cause (Bad Context). Compared with HC, individuals with ASD were much more likely to reject the opportunity to earn ill gotten money by supporting a bad cause than were HCs. Computational modeling revealed that this resulted from heavily weighing benefits for themselves and the bad cause, suggesting that ASD participants apply a rule of refusing to serve a bad cause because they evaluate the negative consequences of their actions more severely. Moreover, RSA revealed a reduced rTPJ representation of the information specific to moral contexts in ASD participants. Together, these findings indicate the contribution of rTPJ in representing information concerning moral rules and provide new insights for the neurobiological basis underpinning moral behaviors illustrated by a specific difference of rTPJ in ASD participants.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Previous investigations have found an altered pattern of moral behaviors in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which is closely associated with functional changes in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). However, the specific neurocomputational mechanisms at play that drive the altered function of the rTPJ in moral decision-making remain unclear. Here, we show that ASD individuals are more inflexible when following a moral rule although an immoral action can benefit themselves, and experience an increased concern about their ill-gotten gains and the moral cost. Moreover, a selectively reduced rTPJ representation of information concerning moral rules was observed in ASD participants. These findings deepen our understanding of the neurobiological roots that underlie atypical moral behaviors in ASD individuals.

Social behavioural adaptation in Autism

Autism is still diagnosed on the basis of subjective assessments of elusive notions such as interpersonal contact and social reciprocity. We propose to decompose reciprocal social interactions in their basic computational constituents. Specifically, we test the assumption that autistic individuals disregard information regarding the stakes of social interactions when adapting to others. We compared 24 adult autistic participants to 24 neurotypical (NT) participants engaging in a repeated dyadic competitive game against artificial agents with calibrated reciprocal adaptation capabilities. Critically, participants were framed to believe either that they were competing against somebody else or that they were playing a gambling game. Only the NT participants did alter their adaptation strategy when they held information regarding others' competitive incentives, in which case they outperformed the AS group. Computational analyses of trial-by-trial choice sequences show that the behavioural repertoire of autistic people exhibits subnormal flexibility and mentalizing sophistication, especially when information regarding opponents’ incentives was available. These two computational phenotypes yield 79% diagnosis classification accuracy and explain 62% of the severity of social symptoms in autistic participants. Such computational decomposition of the autistic social phenotype may prove relevant for drawing novel diagnostic boundaries and guiding individualized clinical interventions in autism.

Autism or AS is mostly characterized by impairments in a very specific yet intricate skill set, namely: social intelligence. In this work, we focus on "social reciprocity", i.e. the continuous adaptation of one's behaviour that both moulds and appropriately responds to others' behaviour. Our working hypothesis is that social reciprocity deficits in people with AS derive from a basic inability to tune one's adaptation strategy to contextual knowledge about the stakes of social interactions (e.g., others' cooperative or competitive incentives). We ask participants to engage in simple interactive games with AI agents that are endowed with calibrated reciprocal adaptation capabilities. Critically, participants are framed to believe either that they are competing against somebody else (social framing) or that they are playing a gambling game (non-social framing). Only in the social condition do participants know about the (competitive) incentives of their opponents. Computational analyses of action sequences in the games show that, contrary to healthy controls, people with AS do not change their strategy according to whether they hold information regarding their opponents' incentives or not. In addition, these analyses yield 79% diagnosis out-of-sample classification accuracy (AS versus controls) and predict 62% of the severity of social symptoms in people with AS. This demonstrates the feasibility of AI-based quantitative assessments of social cognition and its deficits.

La comprensión de las meteduras de pata en escolares con autismo. Su relación con variables cognitivas y de teoría de la mente

El presente estudio tiene una doble finalidad. La primera es analizar dos de las variables implicadas en la comprensión de las meteduras de pata (MP) en el autismo (Cociente Intelectual; CI, y la Falsa Creencia; FC). La segunda, examinar en detalle las dificultades encontradas en la tarea de MP, dividida la población con autismo en dos grupos según su CI (Grupo 1= rango CI 100-120, Grupo 2 = rango CI 70-85). De dicha tarea de MP, se adaptaron cuatro historias (viñetas y narración) de Baron-Cohen, O’Riordan, Stone, Jones y Plaisted (1999), y se administraron a los dos grupos de niños y pre-adolescente con autismo (N = 34) de entre 7 y 12 años (M = 9.6, DE = 1.55), que las resolvieron a partir de respuestas de elección dicotómica y de explicación verbal. Los resultados demuestran la capacidad predictiva del CI total (r = 0.53; p < 0.001; R2 = 0.28) y de la FC (r = 0.51; p < 0.001; R2 = 0.26). El 40 % de la variabilidad de la tarea de MP se vio explicada por las variables predictores FC y Vocabulario. Además, se encontraron diferencias significativas entre grupos (el Grupo 1 respondió mejor que el Grupo 2) tanto en respuestas de elección forzada personaje (ii) e ignorancia (vii) y la suma total como en su explicación verbal. Estos resultados se discuten más detalladamente debido a su posible repercusión en la vida diaria de las personas con autismo.

Brief Report: Young Children with Autism Can Generate Intent-Based Moral Judgments

Past research suggested that, due to difficulties in mentalistic reasoning, individuals with autism tend to base their moral judgments on the outcome of agents' actions rather than on agents' intentions. In a novel task, aimed at reducing the processing demands required to represent intentions and generate a judgment, autistic children were presented with agents that accidentally harmed or attempted but failed to harm others and were asked to judge those agents. Most of the times, children blamed the character who attempted to harm and exculpated the accidental wrongdoer, suggesting that they generated intent-based moral judgments. These findings suggest that processing limitations rather than lack of conceptual competence explain the poor performance reported in previous research on moral judgment in autism.

Intuitive Moral Reasoning in High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Matter of Social Schemas?

Using a schema-theoretical perspective in the field of moral cognition, we assessed response behavior of adolescent (n = 15) and adult (n = 22) individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in comparison with adolescent (n = 22) and adult (n = 22) neurotypically developed controls. We conceptualized the Intuitive Moral Reasoning Test-in five moral dilemmas, participants had to choose between two alternative actions and assess their decision with respect to emotional valence, arousal, moral acceptability and permissibility from both the perspective of the acting person and then of the victim. Patients with ASD displayed a different decision and response behavior, particularly when the dilemmas were based on extreme life situations in combination with a social schema involving close social relationships.

Visual Encoding of Social Cues Contributes to Moral Reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study

Eye-tracking studies suggest that visual encoding is important for social processes such as socio-moral reasoning. Alterations to the visual encoding of faces, for example, have been linked to the social phenotype of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and are associated with social and communication impairments. Yet, people with ASD often perform similarly to neurotypical participants on measures of moral reasoning, supporting the hypothesis of differential mechanisms of moral reasoning in ASD. The objective of this study was to document visual encoding and moral reasoning in ASD and neurotypical individuals using a visual, ecological, sociomoral reasoning paradigm paired with eye-tracking. Two groups (ASD, Control) matched for age and IQ completed the SoMoral task, a set of picture situations describing everyday moral dilemmas, while their eye movements and pupil dilation were recorded. Moral understanding, decision-making, and justification were recorded. Participants with ASD presented a longer time to first fixation on faces. They also understood fewer dilemmas and produced fewer socially adaptive responses. Despite a similar average level of moral maturity, the justifications produced by participants with ASD were not distributed in the same way as the neurotypical participants. Visual encoding was a significant predictor of moral decision-making and moral justification for both groups. The results are discussed in the context of alternative mechanisms of moral reasoning in ASD.

Social knowledge and social reasoning abilities in a neurotypical population and in children with Down syndrome

Social knowledge refers to the ability to analyze and reason about social situations in relation to social rules which are essential to the development of social skills and social behavior. The present research aimed to assess these abilities with the "Social resolution task" in a neurotypical population of 351 children (4 to 12 years) and 39 young adults, and in 20 participants (10 to 18 years) with Down syndrome. Results showed that young children aged 4 to 6 were well able to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate social behavior but they had significantly more difficulties in judging and identifying social cues for the transgression of conventional rules than for moral ones. Between age 4 and 8, their social reasoning was mainly based on factual answers, while older children showed significantly more social awareness, making more reference to emotional and social consequences for the "victims". The representation of a more universal applicability of social rules seemed to develop later in childhood, as of age 8. In contrast, participants with Down syndrome exhibited significantly more difficulties in judging, identifying and reasoning about transgression of social rules without social awareness. In conclusion, the results have shown that social reasoning abilities develop throughout childhood. Social awareness seems to have a long developmental course, which includes a sensibility about welfare and intersubjectivity, critical for the development of prosocial behavior. The clinical population with difficulties in social interaction and socio-emotional behavior could benefit from an early assessment and from learning social reasoning abilities to improve social skills.