title: A Virtual Joy-Stick Study of Emotional Responses and Social Motivation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
abstract: A new virtual reality task was employed which uses preference for interpersonal distance to social stimuli to examine social motivation and emotion perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Nineteen high function children with higher functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) and 23 age, gender, and IQ matched children with typical development (TD) used a joy stick to position themselves closer or further from virtual avatars while attempting to identify six emotions expressed by the avatars, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise that were expressed at different levels of intensity. The results indicated that children with HFASD displayed significantly less approach behavior to the positive happy expression than did children with TD, who displayed increases in approach behavior to higher intensities of happy expressions. Alternatively, all groups tended to withdraw from negative emotions to the same extent and there were no diagnostic group differences in accuracy of recognition of any of the six emotions. This pattern of results is consistent with theory that suggests that some children with HFASD display atypical social-approach motivation, or sensitivity to the positive reward value of positive social-emotional events. Conversely, there was little evidence that a tendency to withdraw from social-emotional stimuli, or a failure to process social emotional stimuli, was a component of social behavior task performance in this sample of children with HFASD.
authors.affiliation: School of Education, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.|Department of Psychiatry and M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.|Division of Computer Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea.
authors.forename: Kwanguk
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA.
authors.forename: M Zachary
authors.initials: MZ
authors.lastname: Rosenthal
authors.affiliation: School of Education, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Mary
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gwaltney
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Jarrold
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Naomi
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Hatt
authors.affiliation: School of Education, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Nancy
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: McIntyre
authors.affiliation: School of Education, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Lindsay
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Swain
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Marjorie
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Solomon
authors.affiliation: School of Education, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA. pcmundy@ucdavis.edu.|Department of Psychiatry and M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA. pcmundy@ucdavis.edu.|Social Attention and Virtual-reality Lab, 267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA, 95618, USA. pcmundy@ucdavis.edu.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mundy
mesh_terms: D000067877:Autism Spectrum Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D012919:Social Behavior; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: Emotional accuracy; High function Autism Spectrum Disorder; Interpersonal distance; Reward sensitivity; Social-motivation; Virtual avatar