Emotion-related and abstract concepts in autistic people: evidence from the British Picture Vocabulary Scale.
Autistic and nonautistic retarded adolescents and young adults, individually matched for chronological age and performance on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS; Dunn, Dunn, & Whetton, 1982), were compared on those items of the BPVS that independent raters judged (a) emotion-related and (b) highly abstract. Compared to control subjects, autistic individuals scored lower on emotion-related vis-à-vis emotion-unrelated items, an effect that could not be attributed to the "social content" of the items. However, autistic and nonautistic subjects achieved similar scores when responding to highly abstract vis-à-vis "concrete" words of the BPVS. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have specific impairments in grasping emotion-related concepts. They also suggest the need for further study of autistic and nonautistic retarded subjects' difficulties in abstracting. The results have a bearing on the interpretation of the BPVS and on the use of this test as a matching procedure.
Hobson
R P
RP
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London.
Lee
A
A
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D003210:Concept Formation; D004644:Emotions; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary