Assessing Moral Cognitive Skills in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Assessing Moral Cognitive Skills in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

In the international literature, it is currently accepted that, relative to neurotypicals, people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) present patterns of moral judgments marked by a minimization of intentionality and a strong condemnation of agents responsible for accidents. However, until now, all studies are based on declarative paradigms, and no one has proposed to examine the relationship of people with ASD to moral transgressions (i.e. to a bad action done deliberately or to a good deed deliberately omitted) in an implicit paradigm, that is, when the answer is made on the assignment of an expressive face to these moral offenses. Furthermore, no study has investigated whether diminished sensitivity to intention and intransigence of incidental judgment occur in both automatic (implicit) and deliberative (explicit) settings.

Investigators planned to study how people with ASD without intellectual disability process emotions expressed by others in response to different forms of moral offense and to examine whether patterns potentially contrast in degree and/or kind with those of neurotypicals.

In the CoMorA project, participants will participate to two independent tasks: an explicit one of deciding whether or not an emotion expressed on the face of a third person would be an appropriate emotional reaction to the offense, and an implicit one in which the subjects will have to determine the fastest sex to which the face expressing such or such an emotion belongs. This procedure initiates an implicit processing of the facial expression.

The theoretical hypotheses of the CoMorA project are the following:

• In the explicit response condition, people with ASD will show different emotional assignment patterns than controls do, depending on the nature of the offense (accidental transgression, attempted harm, and intentional harm).
• In the implicit response condition, people with ASD will exhibit emotion processing patterns identical to those of controls.
• The differences in responses of controls and people with ASD in the explicit condition will be underpinned by executive functions and social cognitive performances.

Inclusion Criteria:

ASD group:

• Diagnosis of ASD according to DSM-5 criteria
• Age between 18 and 40 years old
• Francophone
• Affiliated to social security
• Having given their consent to participate in the study
• Patient under guardianship and curatorship

Neurotypical group:

• Age between 18 and 40 years old
• Francophone
• Affiliated to a social security scheme
• Having given their consent to participate in the study

Exclusion Criteria:

ASD group:

• Diagnosis of intellectual development disorder established according to DSM-5 criteria
• Language, sensory or motor impairments hindering participation in the study

Control group:

• Neurodevelopmental pathology (declarative)
• Neurological pathology
• Language, sensory or motor impairments hindering participation in the study