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Published on: December 7, 2018
Social-Pragmatic Inferencing, Visual Social Attention and Physiological Reactivity to Complex Social Scenes in
Katja Dindar1, Soile Loukusa2, Terhi M Helminen3
1Research Unit of Logopedics, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oulu, PO Box 1000, 90014, Oulu, Finland. katja.dindar@oulu.fi.
Abstract:
This study examined social-pragmatic inferencing, visual social attention and physiological reactivity to complex social scenes. Participants were autistic young adults (n = 14) and a control group of young adults (n = 14) without intellectual disability. Results indicate between-group differences in social-pragmatic inferencing, moment-level social attention and heart rate variability (HRV) reactivity. A key finding suggests associations between increased moment-level social attention to facial emotion expressions, better social-pragmatic inferencing and greater HRV suppression in autistic young adults. Supporting previous research, better social-pragmatic inferencing was found associated with less autistic traits.
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