Assessing Moral Cognitive Skills in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Plain-language summary

In the international literature, it is currently accepted that, relative to neurotypicals, people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) present patterns of moral judgments marked by a minimization of intentionality and a strong condemnation of agents responsible for accidents. However, until now, all studies are based on declarative paradigms, and no one has proposed to examine the relationship of people with ASD to moral transgressions (i.e. to a bad action done deliberately or to a good deed deliberately omitted) in an implicit paradigm, that is, when the answer is made on the assignment of an expressive face to these moral offenses. Furthermore, no study has investigated whether diminished sensitivity to intention and intransigence of incidental judgment occur in both automatic (implicit) and deliberative (explicit) settings. Investigators planned to study how people with ASD without intellectual disability process emotions expressed by others in response to different forms of moral offense and to examine whether patterns potentially contrast in degree and/or kind with those of neurotypicals.

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