Attenuated impression of irony created by the mismatch of verbal and nonverbal cues in patients with autism spectrum disorder

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 13; no. 10; p. e0205750
• Main Authors: Nuber, Simon, Jacob, Heike, Kreifelts, Benjamin, Martinelli, Anne, Wildgruber, Dirk
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 15.10.2018; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adult; Adults; Analysis; Attenuation; Autism; Autism Spectrum Disorder - psychology; Biology and Life Sciences; Child & adolescent psychiatry; Cognition & reasoning; Communication; Comprehension; Cues; Emotional Intelligence; Emotions; Female; Humans; Irony; Language; Male; Medicine and Health Sciences; Middle Aged; Nonverbal Communication - psychology; Perceptions; Pervasive developmental disorders; Pragmatism; Psychotherapy; Questionnaires; Research and Analysis Methods; Research subjects; Signs and symptoms; Social interaction; Social psychology; Social Sciences; Studies; Verbal irony; Young Adult; Los Angeles California; United States > US; Germany
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0205750

Perception of irony has been observed to be impaired in adults with autism spectrum disorder. In typically developed adults, the mismatch of verbal and nonverbal emotional cues can be perceived as an expression of irony even in the absence of any further contextual information. In this study, we evaluate to what extent high functioning autists perceive this incongruence as expressing irony. Our results show that incongruent verbal and nonverbal signals create an impression of irony significantly less often in participants with high-functioning autism than in typically developed control subjects. The extent of overall autistic symptomatology as measured with the autism-spectrum questionnaire (AQ), however, does not correlate with the reduced tendency to attribute incongruent stimuli as expressing irony. Therefore, the attenuation in irony attribution might rather be related to specific subdomains of autistic traits, such as a reduced tendency to interpret communicative signals in terms of complex intentional mental states. The observed differences in irony attribution support the assumption that a less pronounced tendency to engage in higher order mentalization processes might underlie the impairment of pragmatic language understanding in high functioning autism.