Autism, Music, and the Therapeutic Potential of Music in Alexithymia
Summary (3 min read)
Heterogeneity in Autism
- D ESPITE SIX DECADES OF RESEARCH, CONSENSUS on the developmental and neurological basis of autism has not been reached.
- This heterogeneity is manifested in great variability in the extent and severity of core diagnostic features as well as in intellectual and language impairments.
- Such heterogeneity limits the extent to which unitary treatment approaches can be adopted by educators and therapists.
- One possible contributing factor to this variability has been suggested by findings from a recent large-scale twin study (Happé, Ronald, & Plomin, 2006).
- Indeed, many of the deficits assumed to characterize autism vary in severity within the disorder and are also observed in other, apparently unrelated genetic or neurodevelopmental disorders.
Musical Cognition in Autism
- A number of authors (Huron, 2001; Levitin, 2006; Peretz, 2001) have speculated that individuals with autism are likely to be emotionally unresponsive to music; at most, they may respond to the structural complexity of music.
- Authors sympathetic to the value of music therapy have reviewed the evidence for its effectiveness.
- A question that must be addressed when considering the efficacy of music therapy in autism relates to the locus of effects.
- The pervasive nature of the neurological effects of autism means that the presence of compulsive behaviors could well reflect a compromised reward system in some individuals.
The Role of Music in the Lives of High-Functioning Adults with ASD
- In recent years there have been a number of studies that have focused on the complexities of how normal populations of children or adults engage with music in their everyday lives (e.g., Batt-Rawden & DeNora, 2005, DeNora, 2002, Lamont, 2008).
- Notable among the responses were those of individuals who acknowledged their social deficits, craved social contact, and used music to meet unfulfilled social and emotional needs, among them a sense of belonging to a wider music-loving community, or simply that of being one of a large number of people buying a particular hit record.
- There was, however, one striking difference between the responses of the autistic adults who participated in their study (Allen et al., 2009) and those of the typically developing individuals reported in the literature.
- Items from their study that corresponded to Thayer’s vigour/tiredness axis included statements about the use of music to induce states of excitement or exhilaration.
- There is clear evidence that on the autism spectrum are sensitive to music’s emotional and social dimensions.
Self-Report Data on Emotions Induced by Music
- Returning to published experimental work on the nature of musical emotions, Zentner, Grandjean, and Scherer (2008) analyzed self-report data and observed first order factors identifiable with the emotions of joy, wonder, transcendence, nostalgia, tension, and sadness, among others.
- It seems to be generally agreed that anger, surprise, and disgust are difficult emotions to evoke musically, as well as being emotions that people seldom seek to experience via their planned listening experiences.
- It may be that the typical listener’s tendency to further subdivide Zentner’s three second-order factors into specific musical emotions reflects confabulation, as outlined in the cognitive labelling theory of emotion (see e.g., Schachter & Singer, 1962).
- People with autism are unlikely to engage in such confabulation.
- On the basis of this finding the authors conjectured that the fundamental emotions experienced by their autism group might also be similar to those induced in the wider population, and that group differences in the use of musical descriptors might reflect the presence of alexithymia in the autism group.
Application to Clinical Interventions in Alexithymia: Developmental Origins
- On the principle that if one wishes to treat a condition one needs to understand its aetiology, their first step was to formulate a hypothesis about the developmental trajectory of alexithymia in autism.
- These are no longer purely internal and private (its own feeling) but are also external and public (a facial expression and a set of verbal labels).
- ‘Mr. Grumpy’ shows a range of typically churlish behaviors, whereas ‘Mr. Happy’ smiles a lot and is pleasant to other people.
- If the infant seldom orients to its mother’s face, and does not observe her mimicry of its expressions, links between its own internal emotional states and her facial expressions will not be formed.
- The authors suggest that the autistic infant’s inability to benefit from such early bootstrapping experiences may, at least in part, account for the phenomenon of alexithymia in autism.
Application to Clinical Interventions in Alexithymia: Systematic Induction of Emotion by Music
- The authors conjectured above that the fundamental music emotions that their autism group experienced might be similar to those experienced by typical listeners, and that group differences found in experimental results reflect alexithymia in their autism group.
- This would help participants to learn to distinguish their particular varieties of negative and positive emotions, by associating them with passages of music, so that when they experienced a feeling they could give it a music-related label.
- In developing a treatment for alexithymia in adulthood, one is faced with the problem of finding a substitute for the developmental process that, in typically developing individuals, enables them to associate internal feeling states with external signs.
- A system along these lines is already being developed by Professor Rosalind Picard in the MIT Media Lab, and is being tested on college-aged ASD students with promising results (Picard, in press).
Application to Clinical Interventions in Alexithymia: Associative Learning of Music/Emotion Links
- It can be divided into two components conceptually.
- The point of this distinction is that an intervention that facilitates only the first part of the process might still be of value in mitigating the effects of alexithymia.
- This is one instance where a private language may be comparable in usefulness with a public one.
- While their previous research suggests that such an approach will be fruitful, it is possible that some individuals may show highly idiosyncratic, pre-existing associations between internal mood states and musical excerpts.
- The ability to externally label an internal mood state may be beneficial even if it does not conform to conventional associations.
Author Note
- This work was supported in part by Goldsmiths, University of London.
- How alexithymia mediates ability to describe the emotional impact of music in autism.
- Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., text revision).
- Music and informal learning in everyday life.
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- Understanding of simple and complex emotions in nonretarded-children with autism.
- Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 33, 1169-1182.
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Cites background from "Autism, Music, and the Therapeutic ..."
...It is possible that forming these low-level associations may therefore be a useful therapeutic approach for those with Type 2 alexithymia (Allen & Heaton, 2010), but would be unavailable for those with Type 1 alexithymia....
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...The sources of learning by which such links may be formed have been delineated elsewhere (e.g. Heyes, 2001; Allen & Heaton, 2010; Heyes, 2010) and include: direct self-observation (the infant feels happy and laughs, enabling the affective state of being happy to be associated with the sound of a…...
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154 citations
Cites background from "Autism, Music, and the Therapeutic ..."
...of empathy), even in the absence of a specific emotional vocabulary [89]....
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References
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"Autism, Music, and the Therapeutic ..." refers background in this paper
...These results show that the triad of impairments that form current diagnostic criteria for autism in DSM-IV-TR (American Psychological Association, 2000) may be under the control of independent genetic factors, thus allowing for an even greater degree of heterogeneity than if there were a single,…...
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Frequently Asked Questions (7)
Q2. What is the main reason why the infant rarely orients to its mother’s face?
If the infant seldom orients to its mother’s face, and does not observe her mimicry of its expressions, links between its own internal emotional states and her facial expressions will not be formed.
Q3. What would help participants to learn to distinguish their particular varieties of negative and positive emotions?
This would help participants to learn to distinguish their particular varieties of negative and positive emotions, by associating them with passages of music, so that when they experienced a feeling they could give it a music-related label.
Q4. What is the main reason why the research shows that social communicative cues are less?
Research shows that social communicative cues are less salient for infants who are subsequently diagnosed with autism; for them familiar faces, in particular those of their mothers, are not salient (Dawson et al., 2002).
Q5. Why do they base this hypothesis on the proposal?
They base this hypothesis on the proposal (see for example, Huron, 2001) that music evolved primarily for its value in promoting social bonding in early human society.
Q6. What did the participants in their study use to describe their mood changes?
In contrast, the participants in their autism sample showed almost no use of valence terms, and instead used descriptors of states lying along two dimensions of arousal, with calmness/tension as opposite poles of one axis, and excitement or exhilaration as the desired state on the other axis.
Q7. What measures were used to identify alexithymia?
All participants were screened for alexithymia using the self-report measures TAS-20 (Bagby, Parker, & Taylor, 1994) and BVAQ (Vorst & Bermond, 2001).