其他摘要 | Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are neurodevelopmental characterised by impairment in social communication and restricted conditions repetitive behaviors and interests. The key symptom is impaired social communication in which social attention deficit is the foundation of other cognitive deficits. The perspective of the continuum nature of autistic traits distribution suggests that autistic traits are continuously distributed behavioral patterns, with ASD at the higher end of the autistic traits continuum. The general population may also experience symptoms and behavioral manifestations of autism which don't meet the criteria for clinical diagnosis. Autistic traits in this article refer to non clinical autistic traits, which are specific personality traits that are milder but similar in nature to ASD.
Arousal models assume that the social impairment of ASD individuals is due to the hyperarousal or hypo-arousal to social information. Among them, the hyperarousal model believes that ASD individuals have a higher arousal to social information, and they regard social information as threatening stimuli, so that they react with anxiety and escape from threats. The hypo-arousal model believes that ASD individuals have a lower arousal to social information and are not interested in social information. There is still a controversy over whether the social deficit of individuals with ASD conforms to the hyperarousal model or the hypo-arousal model. The level of arousal induced by social information is referred as social arousal in this thesis.
Individuals with high autistic traits exhibit similar performance in social cognition and social function with ASD patients. Based on the continuum of autistic traits in the population, individuals with high autistic traits may have similarities in their social attention ability and potential arousal mechanisms with ASD patients. At present, there is a lack of sufficient evidence to demonstrate how autistic traits moderate the arousal to social information. This research attempts to compare the social arousal of individuals with different autistic traits in the general population.
There are four sub researches. The first sub research screened the suitable tool for measuring autistic traits. From the second sub research to the last sub research, the relationships between autistic traits and social arousal were explored in different contexts, and the ecological validity gradually improved. Firstly, attention is the common foundation of all psychological activities, and the process of attention is accompanied by different levels of arousal. The sub research 2 containing 3 experiments aimed to explore how autistic traits moderate social arousal triggered by attention content. Experiment 1 compared the social attention bias of individuals with different autistic traits. The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between autistic traits and social attentional facilitation bias score, that is, the higher the autistic traits, the faster the individual noticed social information; individuals with high autistic traits exhibited attentional alertness. The above results are consistent with the hyperarousal theory. Experiment 2 compared the social attentional blink of individuals with different autistic traits, reflecting that social information occupies cognitive resources of individuals with different autistic traits.
The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between autistic traits and social attentional blink, and individuals with high autistic traits had significantly higher levels of social attentional blink compared to individuals with low autistic traits, indicating that compared to individuals with low autistic traits, individuals with high autistic traits have more attention resources occupied by social information. These results demonstrate that individuals with high autistic traits not only do not experience a decrease in social information attention processing, but rather more, further supporting the hyperarousal model hypothesis. Experiment 3 aimed to directly test the social arousal level of individuals with different autistic traits through physiological indicators, and measure their pupillary dilation to different social saliency stimuli. The results showed that the higher the autistic traits, the larger the pupillary dilation caused by true faces and virtual faces, and the higher the arousal level. The result supports the hyperarousal theory with the perspective of physiological arousal.
Secondly, social information may not only appear as attentional content, but may also affect people's arousal as an attentional background. The sub research 3 aimed to examine how autistic traits moderate social arousal caused by attention background using the paradigm of social facilitation. It included one experiment (Experiment 4). The results showed that the condition of whether anyone presence and task difficulty had significant impacts on both subjective and physiological arousal, and autistic traits were not significantly correlated with arousal under different attentional backgrounds. The results indicate that individuals with high autistic traits have similar arousal to individuals with low autistic traits in social attention background, and do not support the hypo-arousal theory.
Finally, in order to further enhance the ecological validity of the research, sub research 4 examined the relationship between autistic traits and social arousal triggered by realistic interactive scenes. There are two parts. Part 1 was to make a social arousal questionnaire. The questionnaire had good reliability and validity, and the score of autistic traits was significantly positively correlated with social arousal's score, which again verified the theory of hyperarousal. Then, Experiment 5 explored the relationship between autistic traits and arousal induced by social activities. The results showed that social activities affected the arousal, and the arousal of individuals with different autistic traits caused by social activities were similar, which again proved that the social motivation of individuals with high autistic traits has not decreased, and the social arousal will also increase significantly in the social activities.
To sum up, it can be concluded that high autistic traits don't lead to the reduction of social attention and social arousal. On the contrary, individuals with high autistic traits even show higher social arousal than individuals with low autistic traits under some paradigms. The research will help us to understand how autistic traits moderate the arousal when individuals process social information, and also help us to reduce the stigmatization of people with high autistic traits. At the same time, it also provides a theoretical basis for the adoption of intervention measures to alleviate the social anxiety of individuals with high autistic traits and improve their social adaptability. It should be noted that the purpose of this research is to explore how autistic traits moderate social arousal in the general population, rather than in ASD individuals. Although the concept of autistic traits comes from ASD, there is currently insufficient understanding of the similarities and differences between them. Therefore, we still need to be cautious about whether the results of this research can be transferred to ASD, and researches comparing high autistic traits and ASD are needed before reaching a conclusion. |
修改评论