The Effects of Autism and Alexithymia on Physiological and Verbal Responsiveness to Music (original) (raw)
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It has been assumed that the social deficits inherent in autism imply that individuals with the condition will be unable fully to appreciate the emotional content of music. My aim was to test this assumption, and to explore more widely the similarities and differences between the experience of music in the normal population and those with autism. My first study used musically-induced mood changes and a behavioural measure to show that mood music has measurable effects on cognitive processes in a control group. The second study focused on high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum, using semi-structured interviews to investigate the part that music plays in their everyday lives, concluding that autism is no bar to a full appreciation of the emotional uses of music, though also suggesting a degree of impoverishment in the language they use to describe the emotions. The final set of experiments compared control and autism groups directly, using physiological (GSR) measures of arousal together with self-report of the emotions evoked by a set of musical items. Standardized questionnaires were employed to measure alexithymia (difficulty in identifying and describing feelings) in individuals. Although the autism group experienced comparable levels of physiological arousal to music, they used fewer words than controls to describe their emotional responses, a difference which correlated strongly with their level of alexithymia. My results are consistent with the hypothesis that in autism, the basic physiological and emotional component of their reactivity to music is functioning normally, but their ability to translate these reactions into conventional emotional language is reduced, in line with their degree of alexithymia. These results suggest that the preserved ability of music to generate emotional arousal in autism may lead to clinical applications for the treatment of alexithymia in autism and other conditions.
Autism, music, and the therapeutic potential of music in alexithymia
It has been argued, in view of the social evolutionary origins of music and the social deficits found in autism, that individuals with autism will be emotionally unresponsive to music. However, a recent study of high-functioning adults with autism has shown that they appear to have a range of responses to music similar to typically developing people, including the deliberate use of music for mood management. In examining why these responses appear unaffected in autism, we explore possible mechanisms for musical mood induction in listeners, hypothesizing that the simulation theory of empathy may illuminate current controversies over the nature of emotion in music. Drawing on these ideas, we put forward suggestions for using a simple associative learning process between musically induced emotions and their cognitive correlates for the clinical treatment of alexithymia, a disorder that is common in autism and characterized by an absence of cognitive insight into one’s emotions.
It is common practice, when studying musically evoked emotions in listeners, to use a self-report format to measure their responses. This paper points out that the outcome of such studies will be affected by individual variability in participants’ ability to verbalize their emotions (type-II alexithymia). It presents results from new research, comparing a sample of high-functioning adults with ASD to a matched control group on their emotional responses to a set of musical items. The study, which included both self-report and physiological measures of emotional responsiveness to music, as well as a separate measure of type-II alexithymia, demonstrates that an apparent reduction in emotional responsiveness to music in the ASD group can be accounted for by the higher mean level of alexithymia in that group. The implication of this, that the ASD group is essentially unimpaired in emotional respononsiveness, is confirmed by the lack of group difference in the physiological responses to music. These findings suggest that future studies of musical emotions using self-report measures to compare groups whose mean alexithymia scores may differ, should not be interpreted as proving the existence of group differences in emotional responsiveness unless the alexithymia factor has also been taken into consideration.
Music: a unique window into the world of autism
Understanding emotions is fundamental to our ability to navigate the complex world of human social interaction. Individualswith autism spectrum disorders(ASD) experience difficultieswith the communication and understanding of emotions within the social domain. Their ability to interpret other people’s nonverbal, facial, and bodily expressions of emotion is strongly curtailed. However, there is evidence to suggest that many individuals with ASD show a strong and early preference for music and are able to understand simple and complex musical emotions in childhood and adulthood. The dissociation between emotion recognition abilities in musical and social domains in individuals with ASD provides us with the opportunity to consider the nature of emotion processing difficulties characterizing this disorder. There has recently been a surge of interest in musical abilities in individuals with ASD, and this has motivated new behavioral and neuroimaging studies.Here, we review this new work.We conclude by providing some questions for future directions.
Background. Children with autistic spectrum disorders typically show impairments in processing affective information within social and interpersonal domains. It has yet to be established whether such difficulties persist in the area of music; a domain which is characteristically rich in emotional content. Methods. Fourteen children with autism and Asperger syndrome and their age and intelligence matched controls were tested for their ability to identify the affective connotations of melodies in the major or minor musical mode. They were required to match musical fragments with schematic representations of happy and sad faces. Results. The groups did not differ in their ability to ascribe the musical examples to the two affective categories. Conclusions. In contrast to their performance within social and interpersonal domains, children with autistic disorders showed no deficits in processing affect in musical stimuli.
Emotion Perception in Music in High-Functioning Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorders
2011
Abstract Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) succeed at a range of musical tasks. The ability to recognize musical emotion as belonging to one of four categories (happy, sad, scared or peaceful) was assessed in high-functioning adolescents with ASD (N= 26) and adolescents with typical development (TD, N= 26) with comparable performance IQ, auditory working memory, and musical training and experience.