Social Situations + Autism

The article ‘Visual Fixation Patterns During Viewing of Naturalistic Social Situations as Predictors of Social Competence in Individuals With Autism’ investigates whether people with autism use different techniques to controls to extract social information from the world around them. This theory was based on previous research, which has found that people with autism often pay more attention to others’ mouths and less time on the eyes in social situations.

The paper looked at the time participants spent looking at four potential regions- mouth, eye, body and object- when watching a series of videos of complex social situations. Results showed that the time spent looking at the eye region was best at discriminating between those in the autism group and controls. However, within the group of autistic participants, time spent looking at the mouth was most predictive of (and positively correlated to) social competence, as measured by a range of questionnaires. More time spent looking at objects was predictive of greater social disability. The paper puts forward many possible explanations for this unexpected result, but does not claim to be certain of its reason.

Why do you think that time spent looking at people’s mouths was predictive of social competence in the autism group? What kind of social information can be found by looking at someone’s mouth?

To what extent do you think that this paper’s findings are relevant to developing behavioral treatments for autism?

Sarah Wagstaff.

Affective Forecasting

The article here reveals that people base many decisions in life by predictions about their emotional reactions to future events called affective forecasting. One psychological phenomenon dealing with affective forecasting if the impact bias, where people overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to future events, event though they know what the event will be life and they are not in a particularly emotional state at the time of making their forecast.

An example of the impact bias is shown through college students and how they overestimated how happy or unhappy they would be after being assigned to a desirable or undesirable dorm. The students who predicted that they would be happy in a desirable dorm were actually less happy about it as they moved it. The students who predicted that they would not be happy in an undesirable dorm were actually more happy they thought they would be when they actually moved in.


How would the impact bias affect shoppers? How would on view the impact bias as a beneficial aspect?

Wei Tian

Age Differences in Emotional Regulation

This article discusses how people might want to regulate their emotion on a day-to-day basis. Different age groups were looked at ranging from 14 - 86 years old, in order to see what differences there might be between certain age brackets. The terms used in describing these types of regulations are "contra-hedonic" and "prohedonic". Contra-hedonic motivation can be defined as the wish to either maintain or enhance negative affect or dampen positive affect, while Prohedonic motivation can be described as the desire to enhance or maintain positive affect or dampen negative affect. There is discussion in the article about certain circumstances that might influence individuals to utilize a contra-hedonic mindset for positive outcomes, such as when anger helps you to stand your ground in a confrontational situation. It is also mentioned that when the negative affect is combined with a positive affect result, individuals may be more likely to maintain the negative affect (contra-hedonic) in order to experience the positive affect also.

In reference to the findings indicating that older individuals are more likely to use prohedonic regulation techniques while younger individuals such as adolescents, are likely to use contra-hedonic regulation techniques...

Would it be beneficial for younger individuals to use prohedonic techniques instead of contra-hedonic techniques?

By using this type of emotional regulation technique at an early age in life, do you think it would change the way individuals want to influence their emotions throughout their lifetime? How might it affect their subjective well-being over the course of their lifetime?

Amber Witten

Detecting the real from the fake.

From the article Social Rejection and Facial Expressions of Emotion, we learn that those who have been rejected socially are better at detecting real emotion compared to those who have not been socially rejected. The experiment focused on the fact that socially rejected people were able to tell when a smile was real or fake. The fact that the socially rejected were better at distinguishing between real and fake helps support the fact that basic emotions are in fact universal. Also, the article mentions that those who are socially rejected are better able to detect genuine facial expression because they have increased attention to social cues. Therefore, they can know when others are being real about accepting them into their group so it helps to minimize rejection. This shows the evolutionary perspective at work, people use previous experiences to know whether it was rewarding and approach the situation or to avoid it. For example, Candace, a character from a cartoon, is constantly trying to get Jeremy to like her, but it is a struggle for her because she was rejected by him and his friends because she has weird little brothers. When ever Candace approaches Jeremy she is able to tell whether he will be accepting of her before he even begins to talk. She notices that when he is alone that he tends to show more real emotions than he does when he is with his friends. By noticing this she avoids getting rejected and embarrassed by him because she learns when to approach him.

How would being able to detect real emotions benefit in a job setting?

What other ways besides being socially rejected could one use to better their detection of social cues?

Creshun White