Discrepancies between explicit and implicit evaluation of aesthetic perception ability in individuals with autism: a potential way to improve social functioning

Mazza et al. BMC Psychology (2020) 8:74 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-020-00437-x RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Discrepancies between explicit and implicit evaluation of aesthetic perception ability in individuals with autism: a potential way to improve social functioning Monica Mazza1,2* , Maria Chiara Pino1,2, Roberto Vagnetti1, Sara Peretti1, Marco Valenti1,2, Antonella Marchetti3 and Cinzia Di Dio3 Abstract Background: The capacity to evaluate beauty plays a crucial role in social behaviour and social relationships. It is known that some characteristics of beauty are important social cues that can induce stereotypes or promote different behavioural expectations. Another crucial capacity for success in social interactions is empathy, i.e. the ability to understand and share others’ mental and emotional states. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have an impairment of empathic ability. We showed in a previous study that empathy and aesthetic perception abilities closely related. Indeed, beauty can affect different aspects of empathic behaviour, and empathy can mediate the aesthetic perception in typically developing (TD) individuals. Thus, this study evaluates the ability of aesthetic perception in ASD individuals compared to TD individuals, using the Golden Beauty behavioural task adapted for eye-tracking in order to acquire both explicit and implicit evidences. In both groups, the relationship between empathic and aesthetic perception abilities was also evaluated. Methods: Ten ASD individuals (age ± SD:20.7 ± 4.64) and ten TD individuals (age ± SD:20.17 ± 0.98) participated in the study. Participants underwent empathy tasks and then the Golden Beauty task. To assess differences in the participants’ performance, we carried out a repeated measures general linear model. Results: At the explicit level, our behavioural results show an impairment in aesthetic perception ability in ASD individuals. This inability could have relevance for their ability to experience pleasure during social interactions. However, at the implicit level (eye-tracking results), ASD individuals conserved a good ability to feel aesthetic pleasure during the Golden Beauty task, thus indicating a discrepancy between the explicit and implicit evaluation of the beauty task. Finally, beauty perception appears to be linked to empathy when neither of these capacities is compromised, as demonstrated in the TD group. In contrast, this link is missed in ASD individuals. (Continued on next page) * Correspondence: 1 Department of Applied Clinical Sciences and Biotechnology, University of L’Aquila, Via Vetoio, Località Coppito, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy 2 Reference Regional Centre for Autism, Abruzzo Region Health System, L’Aquila, Italy Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Mazza et al. BMC Psychology (2020) 8:74 Page 2 of 15 (Continued from previous page) Conclusion: Overall, our results clearly show that individuals with autism are not completely blind to aesthetic pleasure: in fact, they retain an implicit ability to experience beauty. These findings could pave the way for the development of new protocols to rehabilitate ASD social functioning, exploiting their conserved implicit aesthetic perception. Keywords: Aesthetic perception, Empathy, Social cognition, Autism spectrum disorder, Eye-tracking Background In non-human primates, aesthetic perception plays a crucial role in mate selection and reproductive capacities [1, 2]. In the human species, the ability to perceive beauty has an additional relevance in influencing social behaviour [3]. Across different cultures, there exist features of beauty that determine an ‘objective beauty’; at the same time, beauty can induce a ‘subjective pleasure’ in each person [4, 5]. In fact, human aesthetic judgement is a complex mix of genetic, cultural, objective and subjective factors [1]. It has indeed been shown that more attractive women have more offspring over a lifetime compared to less attractive women. In addition, some features of faces, like symmetry, are generally associated with fertility and even higher moral values [3, 6]. In bargaining, attractive people receive higher offers [7] and tend to be considered as more reliable, even by children [8], supporting a strongly rooted proclivity to aesthetics. Judgement of other people’s attractiveness probably occurs subconsciously and influences us in ways we do not consciously realise [3]. Taken together, these findings suggest that some characteristics of beauty are important social cues that can induce stereotypes or promote different behavioural expectations [9]. Ultimately, they may also affect the ability to experience pleasure, which plays an important role in social interactions [10, 11]. A fundamental capacity for successful social interactions is social cognition (SC), a complex cognitive construct that allows one to encode and decode the social world [12, 13]. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by a) deficit in social communication and social interaction, and b) restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviours, interests or activities [14]; its prevalence in the general population is around 1% [15, 16]. It is known that people with ASD show impairment of SC abilities [12]. Specifically, people with autism have difficulty with the ability to experience empathy, which is a main component of SC. Empathy should no longer be considered as a unitary concept, but is a multidimensional process that includes at least two dimensions [17–20]: a cognitive component (also known as theory of mind), consisting of the ability to understand and explain the mental states of others—in other words, what others are thinking or feeling [17]; and an emotional component, being the ability to respond emotionally to other people’s feelings while understanding that they ar (...truncated)