NCT05551260

Assessing Moral Cognitive Skills in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 60 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Hôpital le Vinatier · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 40 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

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.

Detailed description

In the CoMorA project, participants will participate to two independent tasks: an explicit one of deciding whether or not an emotion expressed on the face of a third person would be an appropriate emotional reaction to the offense, and an implicit one in which the subjects will have to determine the fastest sex to which the face expressing such or such an emotion belongs. This procedure initiates an implicit processing of the facial expression. The theoretical hypotheses of the CoMorA project are the following: * In the explicit response condition, people with ASD will show different emotional assignment patterns than controls do, depending on the nature of the offense (accidental transgression, attempted harm, and intentional harm). * In the implicit response condition, people with ASD will exhibit emotion processing patterns identical to those of controls. * The differences in responses of controls and people with ASD in the explicit condition will be underpinned by executive functions and social cognitive performances.

Conditions

• Autism Spectrum Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Neuropsychological assessments (tests allowing to measures attentional, executive and emotional performances) and experimental protocol assessing moral cognition	Day 0: sending of the information notice Day 1 : signing the consent form + neuropsychological tests assessing reasoning and abstraction abilities, attentional processes, executive functions (including inhibition and mental flexibility) and social cognitive functions, including facial emotion recognition, theory of mind and perception and social knowledge (duration 1h30-2h). Experimental protocol: vignettes of moral offenses manipulating variables of intention and consequence. This systematic manipulation, commonly used in the field of moral judgment, usually leads to 3 combinations of variables: intentional harm (present intention; present consequence); attempted harm (intent present; consequence absent); accidental harm (intention absent; consequence present). Another form of accidental harm will also be constructed (positive intention; present consequence) (duration : 1h) Between day 1 and day 21 : second part of the Day 1 tests

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-05-02
• Primary completion: 2025-04-01
• Completion: 2025-04-01
• First posted: 2022-09-22
• Last updated: 2024-03-07

Locations

1 site across 1 country: France