TY  - JOUR
A1  - Nuber, Simon
A1  - Jacob, Heike
A1  - Kreifelts, Benjamin
A1  - Martinelli, Anne
A1  - Wildgruber, Dirk
T1  - Attenuated impression of irony created by the mismatch of verbal and nonverbal cues in patients with autism spectrum disorder
T2  - PLoS one
N2  - 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.
KW  - Emotions
KW  - Autism
KW  - Autism spectrum disorder
KW  - Reaction time
KW  - Language
KW  - Social communication
KW  - Face
KW  - Questionnaires
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/47688
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-476886
SN  - 1932-6203
N1  - Copyright: © 2018 Nuber et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
VL  - 13
IS  - (10): e0205750
SP  - 1
EP  - 13
PB  - PLoS
CY  - Lawrence, Kan.
ER  -