Illusory memories of emotionally charged words in autism spectrum disorder: further evidence for atypical emotion processing outside the social domain.

Full Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that individuals with ASD may not accumulate distinct representations of emotional information throughout development. On the basis of this observation we predicted that such individuals would not be any less likely to falsely remember emotionally significant as compared to neutral words when such illusory memories are induced by asking participants to study lists of words that are orthographically associated to these words. Our findings showed that typical participants are far less likely to experience illusory memories of emotionally charged as compared to neutral words. Individuals with ASD, on the other hand, did not exhibit this emotional modulation of false memories. We discuss this finding in relation to the role of emotional processing atypicalities in ASD.

Author information

Author/s: Gaigg, Sebastian B (SB); Bowler, Dermot M (DM);

Affiliation: Autism Research Group, Department of Psychology, City University, Northampton Square, London EC1V0HB, UK. s.b.gaigg(-atsign-)city.ac.uk

Grants: (Agency:Wellcome Trust)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of autism and developmental disorders (J Autism Dev Disord), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Jul; vol 39 (issue 7) : pp 1031-8

Dates: Created 2009/06/10; Completed 2009/09/28;

PMID: 19296212, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 9/28/2009, IMS Date: )

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