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. 1989 Dec;19(4):601-23.
doi: 10.1007/BF02212860.

Emotion-related and abstract concepts in autistic people: evidence from the British Picture Vocabulary Scale

R P Hobson  1 , A Lee
Affiliations

Emotion-related and abstract concepts in autistic people: evidence from the British Picture Vocabulary Scale

R P Hobson et al. J Autism Dev Disord. 1989 Dec.

Abstract

Autistic and nonautistic retarded adolescents and young adults, individually matched for chronological age and performance on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS; Dunn, Dunn, & Whetton, 1982), were compared on those items of the BPVS that independent raters judged (a) emotion-related and (b) highly abstract. Compared to control subjects, autistic individuals scored lower on emotion-related vis-à-vis emotion-unrelated items, an effect that could not be attributed to the "social content" of the items. However, autistic and nonautistic subjects achieved similar scores when responding to highly abstract vis-à-vis "concrete" words of the BPVS. The findings suggest that autistic individuals have specific impairments in grasping emotion-related concepts. They also suggest the need for further study of autistic and nonautistic retarded subjects' difficulties in abstracting. The results have a bearing on the interpretation of the BPVS and on the use of this test as a matching procedure.

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