Dissertation

Emotional Self-Awareness : Definitions, Measurement, and Relevance to Autism

Huggins, Charlotte Frances

2021

Overview

Autism is thought to be associated with greater difficulties in being aware of one's own emotions. However, most of this research is based on self-report outcomes and may not reflect actual ability. My goal was to examine if autism was associated with poorer emotional self-awareness, even when accounting for measurement tools. I systematically reviewed the literature comparing autistic and non-autistic groups in emotional self-awareness. Meta-analysis revealed that while autistic participants had poorer emotional self-awareness than their neurotypical peers, the size of this effect was dependent on the measurement tools used. Furthermore, qualitative analyses confirmed that emotional self-awareness is inconsistently defined and mostly measured with self-report. To address this gap in the literature, I developed a novel method to measure emotional self-awareness through psychophysics - the Emotional Consistency task (EC-Task). I validated the EC-Task in a series of four studies, with neurotypical UK and Japanese adults and in clinical samples. The EC-Task emerges as a robust psychophysical measure of emotional self-awareness with minimal verbal demands, which can be implemented easily and efficiently in laboratory settings. Moreover, autistic traits were not associated with poorer EC-Task performance, despite being associated with greater self-reported emotional self-awareness difficulties. Instead, autistic traits were associated with greater discrepancy between self-reported and behavioural measures of emotional self-awareness. In particular, those with higher autistic traits under-estimated their emotional self-awareness abilities. This effect also emerged in the clinical populations. My findings suggest that emotional self-awareness may be intact in autism and previous findings are biased by self-report, potentially through more negative views about the self. As the majority of research is based on self-report, previous findings may overstate the extent of emotional self-awareness problems in autism. Moreover, the EC-Task represents a unique way to further explore this possibility, through replication in wider clinical samples.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Autism / Disability studies / Exchange programs / Self awareness