The word "autism" has become a frequently used word on the Internet, and people often use it to make fun of their current negative emotions. After all the witty humor, it shouldn't be overlooked that the word "autism" actually comes from autism spectrum disorder.
Autism has always been a hot topic in academic research. With the development and maturity of research, scholars have discovered that autistic traits also exist in normally developing groups, and individuals with higher levels of autistic traits will show cognitive characteristics and behavioral patterns similar to autism, such as social deficits.
In daily life, we usually process information related to ourselves faster because of the individual's self-advantage effect, also known as self-bias. However, as social animals, humans are inseparable from social interactions. The degree of intimacy with others will affect the way an individual processes and responds to information about others.
Aron found that subjects responded fastest to adjectives that described both themselves and their spouses when doing free recall tasks. This is a manifestation of self-other overlap, that is, the closer the relationship with others, the faster they respond to information related to others, thus weakening the self-bias or disappearing the self-advantage effect.
Therefore, by studying the impact of autistic traits and social scene characteristics (social intensity, faces) on individual self-bias, we can understand the social characteristics of individuals with high and low autistic traits, and then provide ideas for measures to promote good social interactions for individuals with high autistic traits, and provide inspiration for autism intervention.
The research mainly explores the impact of autistic traits, social intensity and emotion on self-bias among college students. It is divided into three experiments for research. Experiment 1 uses the self-association task paradigm of matching colors and identity labels.
uses reaction time as the measurement index of the study, and reaction time and effect size as the analysis index. Explore the impact of autistic traits, social intensity and frame of reference on individuals' self-bias when they are observers of others' social interactions. The results of
show that: (1) The interaction between autistic traits and identity labels is not significant, and the level of autistic traits does not affect an individual's self-bias. Both show a self-bias effect;
(2) The frame of reference and social intensity interact on an individual's self-bias; in non-social scenes, the first-person perspective speeds up the response of individuals with high autistic traits to information about friends; in social scenes, the first-person perspective speeds up the responses of individuals with low autistic traits to information about friends.
In Experiment 1, social intensity and frame of reference work simultaneously, which is complex. In order to further explore the social attention characteristics and information processing characteristics of individuals with high and low autism traits in different social intensity activities, Experiment 2 followed the self-association task paradigm of Experiment 1, but adjusted the stimulus materials and situations of the experiment, as follows:
(1) spatial distance Two virtual character models are no longer presented against the background, only one virtual character model is retained;
(2) adds a finger button model based on Experiment 1. This model will present the subject's specific key press reaction on the reaction screen and result feedback screen, enhancing the subject's mirror synesthesia and proprioception. For example, when the subject does not respond, a model with two fingers on the keys but neither button lights up will appear on the reaction screen; the
(3) spatial distance background and the finger button model encourage the subject to have the illusion that they are participating in social interaction. The avatar model with the same orientation as the subject is regarded as forming a social scene with the subject's body, while the avatar model with the opposite orientation as the subject is regarded as forming a non-social scene with the subject's body.
Experiment 3 uses the self-association task paradigm to further explore how emotional faces as social cues affect the self-bias of individuals with high and low autistic traits in social situations. Based on the stimulus materials of Experiment 2, only avatar models facing the opposite direction to the subjects were retained, and three emotional faces were added to the avatar models.
The results found that: (1) Under the influence of emotional faces, the friend-self bias effect of the two groups of subjects disappeared, that is, statistically there was no significant difference between the responses of high and low autistic individuals to friend associations and self-associations, but there was a trend of self-biased effects from a numerical perspective;
(2) The main effect of emotional valence was significant. Compared with happy emotions and neutral emotions, individuals overall responded slower under the conditions of angry emotional faces.
1. The impact of autistic traits on self-bias
For a long time, most researchers have believed that patients with autism have a low ability to distinguish "self-others" due to impaired self-awareness, thus affecting their social interactions. Individuals with high autistic traits show similar social behaviors to those with autism. Therefore, some researchers have suggested that individuals with high autistic traits may also have weakened self-awareness.
Therefore, this study used the color-identity label association task mainly to understand the self-bias of individuals with high and low autism traits at the level of perception and memory. The experimental results found that individual responses to the identity association task were not affected by the level of autism traits, indicating that the information processing methods of the two groups are similar.
2. Individuals as observers of other people’s social interactions
The social scene condition setting in Experiment 1 is based on Sun’s Experiment 4 setting and adds a spatial distance background and a non-social scene. As a result, under different social intensities, the friend-self bias of individuals with low autistic traits disappeared.
This may be because the spatial distance background affects the individual's perception of external stimuli, enhances the subject's spatial distance, and promotes the individual to regard himself as an observer of other people's social interactions, and the social scene, as a social cue, will attract the individual's social attention.
This kind of social attention will enhance the social motivation of individuals with low autistic traits, produce self-other overlap, and incorporate information about best same-sex friends into the self for representation. In
Experiment 1, there was a 300ms social scene stimulus before the identity label presentation. According to the mechanism of the social attention network, this stimulus is a non-predictive cue.
Under the condition of non-predictive cues, individuals with high autistic traits still have a strong self-advantage effect in social scenes and are not affected by the first-person perspective, but they show a weakened self-advantage effect in non-social scenes.
This may indicate that individuals with high autistic traits regard social scenes as social cues and non-social scenes as non-social cues, and have difficulty in paying attention to non-predictive social cues; on the contrary, non-predictive social cues promote the behavioral responses of individuals with low autistic traits.
The first-person perspective only works when low-autistic individuals observe social scenes and when high-autistic individuals observe non-social scenes. One possible explanation is that the two groups of subjects mainly processed the social scene as a whole, weakening the role of the reference frame.
Under social scene conditions, individuals with high autistic traits preferentially process non-social scenes, while individuals with low autistic traits preferentially process social scenes. Although the self-referential frame did not have a stable effect in Experiment 1, it was found that the self-referential frame promoted individuals to speed up their responses to friend associations in the social situations preferred by both groups of subjects.
On the one hand, individuals tend to use self-reference frames to represent relevant information about friends, which is a manifestation of the self-advantage effect.
On the other hand, it may be that mirror synesthesia prompts individuals with high autism traits to perceive a virtual character model facing the same direction as their own when observing a non-interactive social scene, which is a non-social scene that is in line with their scene preference.
(1) The influence of social intensity and frame of reference on the self-bias of individuals with high autistic traits
Specifically, individuals with high autistic traits showed a friend bias when observing two social scenes, which shows that they, like individuals with low autistic traits, can distinguish between familiar people and strangers very well. In non-social situations, the effect size of friend-self bias from the third-person perspective was significantly larger than that from the first-person perspective.
Under the first-person perspective condition, the effect size of friend-self bias in social scenes is significantly larger than the effect size of friend-self bias in non-social situations. Both results also illustrate that highly autistic individuals speed up their response to information about friends in non-social situations and from the first-person perspective.
shows that individuals with high autism traits may avoid direct communication with friends. It can also be explained by the theory of empathy-systematization. It is difficult for individuals with high autistic traits to empathize with others and to share the emotional feelings of others from the perspective of others. Therefore, individuals with high autistic traits will show a self-centered bias in social situations.
In non-social situations, due to the role of embodiment, they are prompted to process information about friends in a self-referential frame, reducing the distinction between themselves and their friends.
(2) The impact of social intensity on the bias of individuals with low autistic traits
Individuals with low autistic traits only show stable stranger-self bias effects and friend bias effects in social scenes; while in non-social scenes, there is no friend bias effect.
And only when compared with strangers, a weak self-biased effect appears, which shows that social situations will enhance stranger-self-bias and friend-bias in individuals with low autistic traits.
Compared with high autistic individuals, low autistic individuals have similar attentional processing of information related to themselves and their friends no matter what kind of social scene they are in, and the reaction time of the friend association of the low autistic trait group is significantly smaller than the reaction time of the friend association of the high autistic trait group.
This may explain that individuals with low autistic traits have a relatively stable "self-other overlap" phenomenon. In the process of interacting with friends, you can quickly and correctly think from the perspective of your friends, thereby understanding their emotional experience and promoting the quality of friendship.
In Experiment 1, there was no difference in the response of individuals with low autistic traits to strangers in social scenes, but there were differences in Experiment 2. On the one hand, it may be due to the above mentioned self-reference in non-social scenes.
On the other hand, it may be that social situations require individuals to use more attention resources for detailed processing, such as being affected by social cues such as the emotions of strangers. However, this view needs to be verified by exploring the reactions of individuals with low autism traits to the emotions of strangers in social situations.
