Abstract
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) succeed at a range of musical tasks. The ability to recognize musical emotion as belonging to one of four categories (happy, sad, scared or peaceful) was assessed in high-functioning adolescents with ASD (N = 26) and adolescents with typical development (TD, N = 26) with comparable performance IQ, auditory working memory, and musical training and experience. When verbal IQ was controlled for, there was no significant effect of diagnostic group. Adolescents with ASD rated the intensity of the emotions similarly to adolescents with TD and reported greater confidence in their responses when they had correctly (vs. incorrectly) recognized the emotions. These findings are reviewed within the context of the amygdala theory of autism.
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Notes
Recordings of the stimuli can be found at: http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/levitin//MusicalEmotionRecognition_Quintin_et_al_2010.htm
Here, “intended emotion” does not mean to imply that this was necessarily the emotion intended by the composer; rather, it is the emotion most often identified by participants in validation studies, and thus, is the emotion that the experimenters “intended” the participant to recognize., i.e. select in the recognition task.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the doctoral degree (Ph.D.) in Psychology at Université du Québec à Montréal by the first author. The research was supported in part by doctoral grants to EMQ by FQRSC and the Canadian Autism Research Training Program, and by research grants to DJL from NAAR/Autism Speaks (#1066), NSERC (#221875-10), and the John and Ethelene Gareau Foundation. We would like to thank the participants and their families; the English Montreal Schoolboard, Summit School, Montreal Children’s Hospital; Pamela Heaton for guidance and advice; Annie Coulter, Many Black, Shirley Elliott, and Bianca Levy for help with testing and recruiting participants; Bennett Smith and Karle-Philip Zamor for technical assistance.
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Quintin, EM., Bhatara, A., Poissant, H. et al. Emotion Perception in Music in High-Functioning Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorders. J Autism Dev Disord 41, 1240–1255 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-1146-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-1146-0