Brief Report: A Comparison of the Preference for Viewing Social and Non-social Movies in Typical and Autistic Adolescents.
Indu Dubey, Danielle Ropar, Antonia F de C Hamilton
PMID 27878740WHAT IT FOUND
Across the whole sample, choices were driven mainly by how hard the box was to open; whether a participant had autism did not explain the overall pattern.
In the autism group alone, object movies were preferred over adult-face movies.
Key findings
01In the combined analysis, choices were driven mainly by effort; stimulus type had only a marginal effect, and diagnostic group was not a significant predictor.
02When the autistic group was analysed separately, its choices were significantly influenced by stimulus type, showing a preference for object movies over social movies.
03The typically developing group showed no clear preference for social movies; their choices depended on effort and stimulus pairing.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The authors excluded 11 of the 79 adolescents who took part to create matched groups. The Choose-A-Movie task is a laboratory measure, and the authors note it is difficult to establish whether it truly measures social motivation without another standard measure. The current data did not show a relationship between the task preference and the SRS social motivation subscale. The social movies used adult faces, which may be less appealing to adolescents than peer faces. The overall model did not find a significant effect of diagnostic group; the autism preference finding came from analysing the autistic group separately. Findings may not generalise to everyday social choices.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the University of Nottingham and the European Research Council. The supplied text does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that autistic adolescents are generally less motivated to engage with people. The task compared adult smiling faces with household objects, and the combined analysis did not show a significant diagnostic-group effect (p = 0.172). The typical group also did not show a clear social preference (p = 0.692).