Abstract
The current study examined whether autistic children’s perception of others’ pain could be modulated by their first-hand pain sensitivity and theory of mind (ToM). We measured the first-hand pain sensitivity, the rating of others’ pain intensity, and the performance in the ToM tasks in 43 5- to 8-year-old autistic and 30 neurotypical children. Our results revealed hyposensitivity to first-hand pain, underestimation of others’ pain intensity, as well as difficulties in the False Belief subtasks of ToM in autistic children. Furthermore, we detected an interaction between children’s first-hand pain sensitivity and ToM in predicting their perception of others’ pain. To be specific, for autistic and NT children with normal or hyper-sensitivity to first-hand pain, better performance on ToM predicted higher ratings for others’ pain intensity; while for autistic and NT children with hyposensitivity to first-hand pain, ToM did not predict ratings for others’ pain intensity. Our study contributes to the understanding of pain perception in young children and provides implications for clinical practices to improve social understanding in autistic children.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are thankful to Ruoran Guo, Cathy Wang, Yining Jiang, Yinan Lv, Gong Wang, staff in the Qingdao Elim School and Qingdao Jining Road Kindergarten, and children and parents who participated in our study.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation was performed by Tianbi Li. The recruitment of participants was supported by Ruoxi, Shi. Data collection was performed by Tianbi Li, and Qianhan, Xiong. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Tianbi Li and Li Yi. And all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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This work was supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 32271116), Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (Li Yi, grant number 2019B030335001), Clinical Medicine Plus X - Young Scholars Project in Peking University, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Li Yi), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Tianbi Li, grant number 2022M710236).
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Li, T., Xiong, Q., Shi, R. et al. Autistic and Non-autistic Children’s Pain Perception is Modulated by Their First-Hand Pain Sensitivity and Theory of Mind. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-024-01176-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-024-01176-y