Rory Allen

TL;DR: Emotion recognition scores in the ASD group were significantly poorer than in the control group and performance was influenced by the severity of alexithymia and the psycho-acoustic complexity of the presented stimuli, which suggests a potential explanation for variability in emotion recognition in non-clinical populations.

TL;DR: A group of high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum was compared with a group of matched controls on two measures of emotional responsiveness to music, comprising physiological and verbal measures, and included the alexithymia score as a mediator variable nullified this group difference.

TL;DR: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum to examine the nature of their personal experiences of music, showing that most participants exploit music for a wide range of purposes in the cognitive, emotional and social domains, including mood management, personal development and social inclusion.

TL;DR: The authors found that children with autism experience difficulties in understanding social affective cues, and it has been suggested that such deficits will generalize to music, and that musical understanding is closely related to the level of language development.

TL;DR: This article explored possible mechanisms for musical mood induction in listeners, hypothesizing that the simulation theory of empathy may illuminate current controversies over the nature of emotion in music, and put forward suggestions for using a simple associative learning process between musically induced emotions and their cognitive correlates for the clinical treatment of alexithymia, a disorder that is common in autism and characterized by an absence of cognitive insight into one's emotions.