Developmental Features Of Theory-of-Mind In Children With Autism——A Study On Emotion Understanding Developmental Features Of Theory-of-Mind In Children With Autism——a Study On Emotion Understanding

Objective:Theory-of-mind (ToM) is an abstractive overall system which gives people ability to infer others’behavior using invisible mental state, believe desire, emotion, etc. as a clue. Emotion understanding as the social cognitive part of theory of mind, refer to ability of explaining the environmental clues and information, mainly about facial recognition and explaining situations set on emotions. The deficit of emotion understanding in autistic children has an important role in understanding their deficit of TOM. This study used4classic emotion understand tasks to study Chinese autistic children’development of emotion understanding and compare with normal developed children.Method:113autistic and normal children aged between35-86month were tested with a series of emotion understanding tasks:(1) emotion naming(2) emotion recognition (3) emotional perspective taking (4) emotion explaining. Using PV subtest in WYCSI-C to control the influence of their verbal ability.Result and Conclusion:By comparing with control groups the results indicated that:1. The whole understanding of4basic emotion---happy sad fear and anger in children with autism is significantly lower than the Norman peers.2. Autistic and normal children’s development of emotion understanding follows the same order which starts from emotion recognition to naming/perspective than reason explaining.3. Unlike their normal peers the emotion understanding ability of autistic children doesn’t have a dramatic change between the age of3-6.4. Even under the text of controlling verbal ability autistic children still have significant difficulties in understand "fear", while control group doesn’t show this handicap.