Empathy, imitation and subjective emotional experience in autism. Ver1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Assessing subjective emotional experience in relation to empathy and imitation accuracy in autism
IRAS ID
235025
Contact name
Justin Williams
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Aberdeen
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
researchregistry3622, The Research Registry identification number
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 1 days
Research summary
Autism is primarily thought to be characterised by social-communication deficits, and rigidity in behaviour, and is often associated with impairments in empathy, the ability to understand another’s emotional states and respond to them in a socially appropriate manner. However, autism is also associated with difficulties understanding one’s own emotional experiences, and it has been recently suggested this may underlie the impairments of empathy common in the condition.\nAutism has also been found to be associated with difficulties accurately imitating the actions of others. Interestingly, greater accuracy when imitating facial expressions has also been associated with higher empathy, indicating that the ability to imitate may also be important in understanding impairments of empathy.\nAs such, improving an autistic individual’s ability to better understand their own emotional experiences may be key to improving their ability to understand the emotional states of others, and the ability to imitate others may be one mechanism to do this. However, little work has examined these constructs in tandem. The current study aims to bridge this gap.\nThe current study will examine s emotional intensity, how strongly participants experience emotion, and emotional granularity, how well participants differentiate between similar emotions, in autism. The primary research question will be to assess if participants with and without autism significantly differ in the way they experience and think about emotion, and whether this is associated by differences in empathy and imitative skills.\nSubjective emotional experience will be assessed with a writing task, in which participants will write about how they would feel in variety of everyday situations, and an affective picture task, where participants will rate their emotional responses to various emotional stimuli. Participants will also imitate a series of facial expressions for the camera, to assess how well they are able to copy the facial expressions of others.
REC name
North of Scotland Research Ethics Committee 1
REC reference
18/NS/0018
Date of REC Opinion
27 Feb 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion