The Social Motivation Theory of Autism
By C. Chevallier, Gregor Kohls, V. Troiani, E. Brodkin, Robert T. Schultz. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2012
1,959 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The idea that social motivation deficits play a central role in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has recently gained increased interest. This constitutes a shift in autism research, which has traditionally focused more intensely on cognitive impairments, such as Theory of Mind deficits or executive dysfunction, while granting comparatively less attention to motivational factors. This review delineates the concept of social motivation and capitalizes on recent findings in several research areas to provide an integrated picture of social motivation at the behavioral, biological and evolutionary levels. We conclude that ASD can be construed as an extreme case of diminished social motivation and, as such, provides a powerful model to understand humans’ intrinsic drive to seek acceptance and avoid rejection.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64441a238d93fc38e7a27610c66f425b9cace422
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Citations in the corpus
- The Role of Emotion Regulation in Autism Spectrum Disorder RH: Emotion Regulation in ASD (2013, neutral): “Functional and structural imaging studies of ASD have identified abnormalities in this area(73,85-87) A similar overlap can be identified in the striate cortex, which plays an important role in the reward components of ER(72) and has been shown to function abnormally in ASD.(75) Given that ER and AS”
- Empathy: a motivated account. (2014, background): “Finally, reduced time on task could limit these individuals’ ability later in the developmental time course (cf. Chevallier et al., 2012).”
- Empathy: Gender effects in brain and behavior (2014, background): “Some have proposed reduced social tuning may be a potential factor contributing to autism (i.e., Chevallier et al., 2012), a disorder characterized by impairments in social competence and empathy (Baron-Cohen et al., 2005).”
- The Neurobiology of Human Attachments. (2017, positive): “The first is the ‘reward-motivation’ system, including the striatum (NA, caudate, putamen), amygdala, VTA, OFC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and ACC, employing DA- and OT-rich pathways [12,130,131], and supporting multiple attachment-related motivational behaviors, such as social orientin”
- A visual analytics approach to understanding cycling behaviour (2012, neutral): “During the sheet-thinning breakup mode (80 We 350) a liquid sheet is formed at the droplet periphery which initially breaks into ligaments and eventually into small fragments.”