Awareness of single and multiple emotions in high-functioning children with autism

This study examined emotional awareness in children with autism. Twenty-two high functioning children with autism (mean age 10 years and 2 months) and 22 typically developing children, matched for age and gender, were presented with the four basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness and fear) in single and multiple emotion tasks. Findings suggest that children with autism have difficulties identifying their own emotions and less developed emotion concepts (which causes an impaired capacity to differentiate between one's emotions within the negative spectrum). The outcome seems to point more to a single emotion perspective within the negative domain, with a more prominent position of fear in children with autism than in typically developing children.