关键词: 孤独症, 心理理论, 情绪识别, 公平分配, 公平决策, 最后通牒任务

Abstract: Maintaining fairness and equity on resource distribution is essential in preserving social concordance. Fairness can be interpreted as being equal in distributions, in consequences or in probabilities. For instance, fairness is present when two individuals do not differ in their right to an object, and both will receive equal benefits from it. Since having erudite appreciation of both mental states and emotional allow use to predict greater use of social situated reasoning, having comprehensive understanding of emotion recognition, a fundamental skill to many social processes and of Theory-of-Mind (ToM), an ability to recognize self-other mental states are essential mechanisms which enhance our understanding of reasons behind human fair allocation and decision making. Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are neurodevelopment disorders characterized by encumbrance in ToM development, which occasioned in impairments in their fairness decision-making. Additionally, although young ASD children display knowledge and expressions of simple emotions; the high function ASD population often desire to engage in social-emotional interactions with peers, eventually they will be less likely in exhibiting response to social emotions; which exacerbates based on older ASD children and adults’ degenerated performance on emotional recognition tasks. Therefore, it is important to examine the role of ToM and emotion recognition in ASD children through empirical approaches. Using the Ultimatum Game (UG), an economical experiment game in which two participants interact and allocate a quantity of resources; the first player proposes a division for the reserve, and the second player can either choose to accept (getting the share) or to reject (neither player obtains anything) the proposition. We investigated the relationship between ToM, self-other emotional recognition and decision making among 29 ASD, 30 developmental disability, 30 intelligence matched and 27 age matched children. The participants will act as an accepter or a distributor interacting with the experimenter, taking turns at either allocating or receiving resources, meanwhile reporting self-other emotion recognition via verbal or non-verbal deportments selecting emotion visage cartoon prints before making decision. Since the age matched children’s basic performances (verbal ability, general intelligence and ToM) significantly surmount the other groups, their data were not further examined. The results suggest that ASD children are more likely than developmental disability and intelligence matched children in accepting extreme small offers (allocations of 2:8 and 3:7). ASD children with intact ToM development are equipped with basic performance and understanding of fairness: ToM and self emotional recognition is significantly correlated and could predict particiapant’s decision making, when ASD children faced unfair distributions (allocations of 1:9, 2:8 and 3:7), the children who passed the ToM task were able to reject the proposer’s offer, the children who reported more negative self-emotions were also more likely to reject the offer. Being able to report self-emotion and having an intact ToM is significantly correlated and plays a substantial role in prediction of ASD children’s UG decision making, this study advocates the importance of examining ToM development and emotional recognition in real-life fairness decision making scenarios in future studies.

Key words: autism spectrum, theory-of-mind, emotion recognition, fair allocation, decision making, ultimatum game