Social-cognitive processing in 6- to 12-year-old children with Asperger's disorder

Students with Asperger's disorder manifest social, behavioral and pragmatic language impairments that result in their lower social acceptance. However, peer rejection in childhood is correlated with both current and future maladjustment, so it is important to investigate the causes of social rejection for children with Asperger's disorder. The first purpose of this study was to determine the relative effectiveness with which students with Asperger's disorder and typically developing students were able to interpret the social intentions of their peers. The second purpose of the study was to determine whether, with a given interpretation of social intention, there were differences in the social interaction strategies chosen by these two groups of students. Twenty students with Asperger's disorder and 20 typically developing elementary school students participated in this study. They viewed videotapes depicting social conflict situations and were interviewed to determine if they perceived the cause of a conflict, how they interpreted an antagonist's actions, and how they would respond in a similar situation. An independent samples t-test indicated that the typically developing group performed significantly better on the encoding of conflicts and benign intention cues. Further, the Asperger's disorder group rejected benign intention cues that they had encoded at a higher rate than their typically developing peers. A mixed ANOVA revealed that there were significant differences between groups for the rating of a peer as "not mean" based on cue type, with the Asperger's disorder group most likely to rate a peer as "not mean" after watching ambiguous vignettes and the typically developing group most likely to give this rating after watching benign vignettes. Additionally, a mixed ANOVA demonstrated that the Asperger's disorder group was significantly more likely to cite the use of aggressive strategies both against peer entry and peer provocation conflict types and when they had attributed a peer to be "mean."