Elsevier

Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Volume 5, Issue 1, January–March 2011, Pages 604-613
Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders

A matter of words: Impact of verbal and nonverbal information on impression formation in high-functioning autism

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2010.07.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Clinical intuition and resent research (Senju et al., 2009) suggests that adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) are able to use explicit verbal information but fail to react upon subtle nonverbal cues in order to understand others and navigate social encounters.

In order to investigate the relative influence of different domains of socially relevant information in HFA as compared to matched controls, we used verbal and nonverbal stimuli as a basis for an interpersonal impression formation task. Results demonstrated a reduced sensitivity to nonverbal cues in individuals with HFA when consideration of conflicting information from the different domains was required, although HFA participants could well evaluate nonverbal stimuli in isolation. Thus, in a more complex experimental setting nonverbal information had a comparably weak impact on the impression formation confirming that social processing is preferentially based on verbal information in HFA.

Introduction

Research on the ability to understand mental states of others, also referred to as ‘theory of mind’ (ToM), has been highly influential in characterizing social cognition in individuals with autism (Frith, 2003). Here, impairments in ToM abilities helped to explain core criteria of autism including qualitative impairments in social communication and reciprocal interaction (10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, ICD-10, World Health Organization). However, in everyday social interactions, we do not only reason about the mental states of others in a given situation – as tested in ‘classical’ ToM tasks – but we also form global evaluative impressions of others, i.e., we feel more or less attracted by the other person. These first impressions not only play a substantial role in interpersonal decision-making with respect to private relationships, but also in professional contexts, mass media or politics (Frey, 1999).

Recent dual-processing accounts of judgment and social cognition assume that (i) the verbal descriptions of the behavior of others (propositional format) and (ii) visual observation of nonverbal behavior (non-propositional format) have different processing paths (Evans, 2008): while nonverbal behavior of others has been demonstrated to play an influential role in the impression formation process (Burgoon, 1994, Domangue, 1978, Droney and Brooks, 1993, Kuzmanovic et al., 2009, Levine and Feldman, 2002, Scherer et al., 1977), it does not necessarily refer to an explicit semantic code like the symbolic verbal information making it on occasion difficult to extract a distinct declarative meaning from single cues (Bente and Kraemer, 2003, Bente and Kraemer, 2008, Bente et al., 2008a, Kraemer, 2008). Further characteristics of nonverbal behavior that add to the difficulty of its explicit interpretation are its (i) high dimensional complexity which refers to the simultaneous co-occurrence of multiple cues (e.g., smile and direct gaze) and the interdependency of meanings of the different cues on each other and (ii) the high processual complexity which denotes the quality of movements characterized by subtle dynamics extending in time rather than static, isolated elements (Bente and Kraemer, 2003, Bente and Kraemer, 2008, Bente et al., 2008a, Grammer et al., 1999, Kraemer, 2008). Consequently, nonverbal behavior is often produced and decoded outside awareness (Choi et al., 2005, Frey, 1999, Gilbert and Krull, 1988, Grammer et al., 1999) and thus might influence the impression formation in a more intuitive way.

Despite the importance of impression formation for social interaction and communication and in contrast to the numerous studies on ToM, there have been no attempts to investigate whether and how individuals with HFA form global evaluative impressions of other people. In the present study, we, therefore, devised an impression formation task that not only requires an understanding of current mental states of another person, but also demands an evaluative assessment of the target person based on verbal behavioral descriptions and nonverbal behavioral samples. In a complex impression formation task, verbal (V) and nonverbal (N) information was presented in a congruent (i.e., V+N+ or V−N−) or in an incongruent (i.e., V−N+ or V+N−) combination with respect to valence (positive +, or negative −). This design allowed for investigating the differential impacts of verbal and nonverbal components of information on the global person evaluation. Additionally, in order to acquire the subjective evaluations of each verbal and nonverbal stimulus for each participant all stimuli were also presented separately in a basic control task. In light of previous studies reporting processing differences for nonverbal social stimuli in HFA (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999, Behrmann et al., 2006, Critchley et al., 2000, Schultz et al., 2000), we expected HFA participants to exhibit difficulties in the decoding and consideration of dynamic, nonverbal cues rather than verbal information during impression formation, particularly during the complex incongruent task in which conflicting information had to be integrated to form a context-sensitive global impression of the other person.

Section snippets

Participants

Fifteen HFA individuals (11 male, mean age 30.47, SD = 7.11 years) were studied and compared to 15 control participants (11 male, mean age 29.87, SD = 6.40 years) who were matched with respect to gender, age, years of education and intelligence (see Table 1). All HFA participants were diagnosed and recruited in the Autism Outpatient Clinic at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cologne (Germany). As part of a systematic assessment the diagnoses were made independently by two

Basic impression formation

As shown in Table 2a and as plotted in Fig. 2a, there was no significant main effect of the factor group within the basic impression formation task indicating that there were no general differences with respect to the capacity to evaluate isolated verbal and nonverbal stimuli between the HFA and the control participants. Furthermore, there was no significant main effect of the factor domain showing that in general verbal and nonverbal information did not elicit differential impression ratings.

Discussion

The present study sought to investigate the differential impact of verbal and nonverbal information on impression formation in HFA. When presenting the socially relevant information independently or in congruent combinations, no significant differences between the HFA and the matched control group were observed. Furthermore, when presenting contradicting verbal and nonverbal information, both groups exhibited a tendency to more strongly rely on verbal information. Importantly, however,

Conclusions

Taken together, HFA individuals show a tendency to rely more strongly on the explicit, verbal domain when forced to integrate conflicting social stimuli. Although they are able to decode the meaning of isolated nonverbal information, HFA participants were significantly less influenced by the same nonverbal cues when making complex social decisions. The nature of cognitive processes that underlie the evaluation of socially relevant verbal and nonverbal information, however, remain an open

Acknowledgments

BK was supported by a grant from the German Ministry of Education and Research (Project “Other Minds”, grant 01 GP 0802). LS was supported by the Koeln Fortune Program of the Medical Faculty, University of Cologne. We thank K. Volpert, U. Behrendt and S. Morell for neuropsychological testing.

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