Research On Pain Word Processing In Chinese High-functioning Autistic Children

Pain is the subjective pain caused by actual or potential physical tissue damage and sensory,emotional,cognitive and social injuries.According to the different sources of pain experience,pain experience can be divided into physical pain and social pain.Physical pain is pain in the general sense,which refers to unpleasant feelings and emotional experiences related to actual or potential tissue injury;Social pain is a kind of experience similar to physical pain,which refers to the actual or potential painful experience caused by the rupture of social relationship or the devaluation of social value,such as rejection,rejection,underestimation,etc.Words around pain experience are collectively referred to as pain words,which are used to convey pain experience to others,usually in the form of words or phrases.Social interaction defect is the core obstacle of high functional autism spectrum disorder.It is difficult for them to understand and perceive social information.There are defects in social emotional interaction,which is manifested as the lack of emotional or emotional sharing.There is no research on the processing of pain words in children with autism spectrum disorder.Therefore,this study will use event-related potential technology to explore the neural mechanism of physical pain words and social pain words processing in the children with high functional autism aged about10—13 years,so as to determine whether there is an atypical pain word processing mode in this group.Compared with the typical discovery development children of the same age,the behavioral results showed that HFA children had lower accuracy in judging the pain relevance of physical pain words and social pain words than TD children;In TD group,there was no significant difference in the judgment results of pain correlation between physiological pain words and social pain words,there was no significant difference in the judgment results of pain correlation between physical pain words and neutral words,and there was no significant difference in the judgment results of pain correlation between social pain words and neutral words.In HFA group,the judgment accuracy of pain correlation between social pain words was lower than that of physical pain words.ERP results showed that there was a significant difference in the processing of pain words between TD group and HFA group at the late stage of 500—800ms,which showed that TD group induced a larger LPP component in both physiological pain words and social pain words,and there was no significant difference in the LPP amplitude between the two groups in TD group;In HFA group,LPP amplitude induced by physical pain words was significantly greater than that induced by social pain words.The experimental results show that Mandarin-speaking TD children aged 10—13can accurately recognize and understand physical pain words and social pain words.TD children aged over 10 have better ability to recognize emotions,understand social information such as social exclusion,and experience pain similar to physical pain.However,10—13 Mandarin-speaking HFA children have deficits in the processing of physical pain words and social pain words.The correct rate of pain related judgment of physical pain words and social pain words is lower than that of TD group,and within HFA children,the correct rate of pain related judgment of social pain words is significantly lower than that of physical pain words.In other words,HFA children "don't think these words are painful".By comparing the behavioral indicators and electrophysiological responses of HFA children and TD children,we found that the processing of social pain words in10—13 years old Mandarin-speaking HFA children was abnormal in both behavioral and ERP experiments.This may be related to the specific representation of HFA children.At the same time,because of the close combination of social pain words and social information,it mainly reflects the rupture of social relationship and reflects the strong unhappiness in interpersonal communication.HFA children have obvious social and empathic barriers,and they may not be able to pay attention to this kind of social emotion.