Emotional decision-making in autism spectrum disorder: the roles of interoception and alexithymia.
Punit Shah, Caroline Catmur, Geoffrey Bird
PMID 27777716WHAT IT FOUND
Adults with autism made more consistent financial decisions than controls, resisting the bias to gamble when outcomes were framed as losses.
This logical consistency was not linked to their ability to sense their heartbeat or their difficulty identifying emotions, suggesting a different decision-making strategy.
Key findings
01Individuals with ASD showed a significantly smaller framing effect than controls, meaning they were less influenced by whether a choice was described as a gain or a loss.
02In the control group, higher interoceptive accuracy (ability to sense heartbeats) and lower alexithymia were associated with a larger framing effect, but this relationship did not exist in the ASD group.
03There was no significant difference in interoceptive accuracy between the ASD and control groups when alexithymia was controlled for.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The sample size was small (40 participants), which limits the generalizability of the findings. The study only included high-functioning adults with average IQs, so results may not apply to individuals with lower cognitive abilities or children. The control group was matched for alexithymia scores, but this does not rule out other unmeasured factors influencing decision-making strategies. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot determine if the reduced framing effect is a stable trait or changes over time.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the Medical Research Council and the Baily Thomas Charitable Fund. No specific conflicts of interest were declared by the authors in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of correlation between interoception and decision-making in the ASD group as evidence that autistic individuals cannot sense their bodily states. The study found no difference in interoceptive accuracy between groups; rather, it suggests that autistic adults do not rely on these bodily signals to guide financial decisions in the same way neurotypical adults do.