J. AUTISM DEV. DISORD. 19/4 (1989) 601-623


Emotion-related and abstract concepts in autistic people: Evidence from the British Picture Vocabulary Scale

Hobson R.P., Lee A.

Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF, UK

Abstract
Autistic and nonautistic retarded adolescents and young adults, individually matched for chronological age and performance on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS; Dunn, Dunn and 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-a-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-a-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.


 

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