The autistic group additionally reported social learning outcomes from reading.įindings contradict prior assumptions that autistic individuals lack the social understanding required by fiction. Both groups reported evidence of empathising, perspective-taking and social understanding while reading. Four themes were identified from interview data (1) reading material choices (2) text investment (3) in-text social understanding and (4) reading as a social learning device. Neurotypical participants tended to prefer fiction, with autistic participants showing no preference between fiction and non-fiction. This study aimed to explore the self-reported reading habits of autistic adults compared to neurotypical adults, accounting for higher education demands.Ī qualitative design was used, with 43 participants (22 autistic 21 neurotypical) completing a reading habits questionnaire and subsequent semi-structured interview. It has long been assumed that autistic individuals lack the social understanding to contemplate fiction, preferring non-fiction.
While research has consistently highlighted the usefulness of narrative texts for social development, this has not been fully explored with autistic adults. As a result, the focused holistic approach to their weaknesses in combination with the use of ICTs is a promising, alternative form of therapeutic approach. Therefore, the limited development of Mind Theory observed in children with autism is associated with deficits in their social, cognitive, and metacognitive mechanisms. The research findings give prominence to the existence of an interaction between the Theory of Mind and the function of the individual's social, emotional, and cognitive skills. The present paper focuses on the interconnection of Mind Theory with the social-emotional, and cognitive development of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Theory of Mind concerns the observation, understanding of mental states, as well as the interpretation of the behaviors that result from them.
Specifically, autistic individuals often showed enhanced socio-empathic understandings of the literature with no empathy deficits when compared to non-autistic participants.Īutism Spectrum Disorder is a complex, heterogeneous disorder that affects perception, information processing, social interaction, verbal, and nonverbal communication, and social, and cognitive behavior. Findings demonstrated the usefulness of serious literature as a research tool for comparing the empathic experiences of autistic and non-autistic individuals. Thematic and literary analysis of the diary reflections and writing tasks revealed three main themes (1) Distance from the Novel (2) Mobility of Response (3) Re-Creating Literature. On finishing the book, participants were asked to engage in three creative writing tasks that encouraged reflective thinking across the novel. Eight autistic and seven non-autistic participants read Of Mice and Men for six days while completing a semi-structured reflective diary. The present study aimed to qualitatively explore how serious literary fiction, through its ability to simulate real-world empathic response, could therefore enable more ecologically valid insights into the comparative empathic experiences of autistic and non-autistic individuals. This artificial separation of thought and feeling fails to replicate the complexity of real-world empathy, and places socially tentative individuals at a relative disadvantage. Associated empirical research has largely relied upon cognitive tests that lack ecological validity and associate empathic skill with heuristic-based judgments from limited snapshots of social information. Dominant theoretical models of autism and resultant research enquiries have long centered upon an assumed autism-specific empathy deficit.
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