Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 5 (2011) 299–304

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The ‘‘beauty is good’’ for children with autism spectrum disorders too D. Da Fonseca a,b, A. Santos a, D. Rosset a,b, C. Deruelle a,* a b

INCM, CNRS, 31, chemin Aiguier, 13402 Marseille cedex 20, France Centre ressource Autisme PACA, Marseille, France

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 7 April 2010 Accepted 22 April 2010

The ‘‘beauty is good’’ (BIG) stereotype is a robust and extensively documented social stereotype. While one may think that children with autism are impervious to the BIG stereotype, given their remarkable difficulties in the social sphere, this issue has not yet been addressed. We have asked 18 children with autism to judge how friendly and intelligent faces appeared. They were then asked to judge the same faces on beauty, and their responses were compared to that of 18-matched controls, as well as to 71 typically developing children. Results revealed similar beauty judgements across the groups. Importantly, children with autism also showed a BIG stereotype, considering friendly and intelligent the beautiful faces, and unfriendly and not intelligent the ugly faces, just like their matched controls and typical children. These findings raise critical questions on stereotype acquisition as well as on the characterization of autism as a global social disability. ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Beauty Face Stereotypes Autism

1. Introduction Categorization enables us to simplify, predict, and organize our world. It is thus an essential ability and an adaptive feature of perception and cognition. Stereotypes, often implicit attributions to an individual based on group membership categories (e.g., religion, ethnicity or age; Allport, 1954), are one great example of categorization of social information, satisfying our need to sort and organize members of a group into tidy categories. Social stereotypes rapidly and robustly emerge in childhood and can influence behaviour even in people that consciously not endorse them. By helping us to predict others’ behaviour, social stereotypes play a major role on social interaction (for a review see Mackie, Hamilton, Suukind, & Rosseli, 1996). Among the wide range of stereotype categories, the ‘‘beauty is good’’ (BIG) is one of the most documented (for a review see Langlois et al., 2000). In the early 70s, a seminal study revealed the ubiquitous preference children have for attractive over unattractive people (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972). Since then a great amount of studies have proved the extensiveness of this stereotype (e.g., Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Ramsey & Langlois, 2002). Amazingly, infants just a few days of age are known to prefer attractive faces (e.g., Slater, Bremner, Johnson, Sherwood, Hayes, & Brown, 2000; Slater, Quinn, Hayes, & Brown, 2000). Furthermore, the BIG stereotype has been shown to be a robust and long-lasting stereotype, with adults still attributing more positive traits (e.g., greater intellectual qualities) to attractive than to unattractive faces (for reviews see Eagly et al., 1991; Langlois et al., 2000). One group of individuals may, however, be impervious to the BIG stereotype. Children with autism are not only ‘‘atypical face processors’’, with a wide number of studies demonstrating a variety of impairments in face processing (e.g., Deruelle, Rondan, Salle-Collemiche, Rosset, & Da Fonseca, 2008; Grelotti, Gauthier, & Schultz, 2002; Rosset et al., 2009), but also show

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +33 4 91 16 43 09; fax: +33 4 91 16 44 98. E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Deruelle). 1750-9467/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.rasd.2010.04.012

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difficulties to predict other people’s behaviour (e.g., Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Ziatas, Durkin, & Pratt, 1998). Other hallmark features of the disorder, such as profound difficulties in social interaction and deficient social development (e.g., Peterson, Slaughter, & Paynter, 2007), may also lead us to hypothesize that children with autism are not subject to socially related stereotypes. Yet, one recent study investigating race and gender stereotypes in 8-year-old children with autism spectrum disorders has found that these children make stereotypical judgements just like typical children (Hirschfeld, Bartmess, White, & Frith, 2007). The aim of the current study was to extend this surprising finding to the BIG stereotype, which despite being an early and robust stereotype in typical development, involves islets of competences particularly diminished in autism—social and facial information processing. We asked children with autism to judge how friendly and intelligent a set of faces appeared. They were then asked how beautiful the same faces appeared and their responses were compared to that of typically developing matched controls.

2. Methods 2.1. Participants This study included three groups of children. The first group was composed of 71 typically developing (TD) children aged 6–17 years (M = 9.3; SD = 2.2). The second group included 18 children (all males) with High Functioning Autism (HFA) aged 7–17 years (M = 11.9; SD = 2.1). Diagnosis was based on the DSM-IV (APA, 1994) criteria autism, as well as on the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R; Rutter, Le Couteur, & Lord, 2003) and the Autism Diagnostic Observation ScheduleGeneric (ADOS-G; Lord, Rutter, DiLavore, & Risi, 2002). Children were excluded from the study for any of the following reasons: mental retardation (full-scale IQ < 70), known neurological or physical disorders, schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders, major depressive disorder, major bipolar disorder and ADHD. All children with HFA were free of medication at the time of testing. IQ was assessed by a chartered neuropsychologist (D.R.) using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III—Wechsler, 1996 or WISC-IV— Wechsler, 2003). Full-scale IQ scores ranged from 80 to 120 (M = 95; SD = 12.6), with verbal-scale IQ scores ranging from 86 to 127 (M = 99.9; SD = 12.3) and performance-scale IQ ranging from 67 to 113 (M = 88.3; SD = 17.5). Children with HFA were recruited via the Developmental Disorders Clinic at the local hospital (Saint Marguerite Hospital, Marseille). Since these scores were within the normal range, children with HFA were individually matched to typically developing children (the control group, CTR) on the basis of chronological age and gender. The CTR group included 18 children (all males) aged 7–17 years (M = 11.4; SD = 2.9). Results of a two-sample t-test revealed no significant age differences between the ASD and the CTR group (t (2, 34) = .14, p > .88). Children belonging to this CTR group were not included in the TD group although they were all recruited via the same local primary and secondary schools. At the time of testing, all children attended normal classes corresponding to their age level. Their teachers were asked to select children with average ability level in their class, thus avoiding the inclusion of children either particularly advanced or delayed relative to their chronological age. None of these children had known neurological, psychiatric, physical disorders or developmental delay. All participants were Caucasian native French speakers and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Parental informed consent was obtained for all participants. The experimental procedure was approved by the Local Ethics Committee. 2.2. Stimuli Stimuli comprised color photographs of neutral faces of male and female Caucasian individuals aged 20–35 years. Stimuli ¨ hman, 1998) and were were taken from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database (KDEF; Lundqvist, Flykt, & O controlled for brightness, color and luminosity. All stimuli were sized 442  652 pixels. Stimuli were selected on the basis of a preliminary study conducted on 65 undergraduate students (30 female, 35 male aged 19–33, M = 21.13 SD = 2.58) who were asked to rate 156 faces (78 male and 78 female faces) on attractiveness using a 7point Likert scale (1 = very unattractive, 7 = very attractive). Based on these ratings, we have selected a total of 54 faces, considered as the most representative faces of three categories (18 faces, 9 male and 9 female, each): ‘‘not attractive’’ (Mmale = 1.57, SD = .13; Mfemale = 1.38, SD = .16), ‘‘average’’ (Mmale = 2.55, SD = .04; Mfemale = 2.66, SD = .10) and ‘‘very attractive’’ (Mmale = 5.01, SD = .70; Mfemale = 5.65, SD = .52). Paired sample t-tests confirmed that ratings for the three conditions were significantly different (all ps < .005). 2.3. Procedure All participants were presented with three tasks comprising exactly the same stimuli (9 ‘‘not attractive’’, 9 ‘‘average’’ and 9 ‘‘very attractive’’ faces, 27 male and 27 male). Participants were first asked to rate how ‘‘friendly’’ (Task A) and ‘‘intelligent’’ (Task B) faces appeared. In each group (TD, HFA, CTR) half of the participants performed Task A first, while the other half performed Task B first. Following this participants were asked to rate how ‘‘beautiful’’1 (Task C) the same faces appeared. Task C was systematically presented after Task A and B to ensure that beauty ratings had no influence on friendliness and

1

The term ‘‘beautiful’’ was used rather than ‘‘attractive’’ in order to adapt the task to children.

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intelligence ratings. Faces were rated using 3-point scales, where 0 meant ‘‘unfriendly/not intelligent/ugly’’, 1 meant ‘‘average’’ and 2 meant ‘‘very friendly/very intelligent/very beautiful’’. Each task was presented in a separate block. Stimuli within each block were randomized across participants in each group. Participants were tested individually in a quiet room at the INCM (CNRS, Marseille, France). They were seated in front of a computer screen (MacBook, 13 in., placed at a viewing distance of 60 cm) and were told that photographs were going to be presented on the screen. Each stimulus was displayed individually for 3 s in the center of the screen. Duration of stimulus presentation was limited to induce children to make quick evaluative judgements, as it happens in everyday social perception. Following each stimulus presentation children were asked to respond by pressing one of three colored response buttons on the keyboard, corresponding to one of the three categories described above. Responses were recorded for each participant in each trial and task using SuperLab 4.51 (Cedrus Corporation, USA). Before each task participants were presented with four training trials to ensure they were at ease with the task instructions. The experimenter remained closed to the child during the experimental session to help them maintaining concentrated. The experimental session lasted for 20–25 min. In order to ensure that these methods were appropriate, the study was first conducted on the TD group. Given the reliability of the results found for this group (see below), the study was replicated in the HFA and its matched CTR group. 3. Results Because the aim of the study was to determine the influence of ‘‘beauty’’ ratings on those of ‘‘friendliness’’ and ‘‘intelligence’’, data were analysed for Task C first. 3.1. Beauty scores in typical and atypical development Beauty scores (ranging from 0 to 2) for typically developing individuals were analysed using a two-way ANOVA including Face Gender (female, male) and Level (ugly (0), average (1), very beautiful (2)) as within-subjects factors. Results revealed significant main effects of Face Gender [F(1, 70) = 12.02, p < .001] and Level [F(2, 140) = 382.57, p < .001]. The Face Gender  Level interaction was also significant [F(2, 140) = 7.63, p < .001]. Results of post hoc analyses using Tukey tests showed significantly increased ratings for female relative to male faces for all levels (Level 1: Mfemale = .63, SD = .04; Mmale = .48, SD = .03, p < .001; Level 2: Mfemale = 1.47, SD = .05; Mmale = 1.28, SD = .05, p < .001), except for the ‘‘not beautiful’’ one (Mfemale = .27, SD = .04; Mmale = .26, SD = .03, p > .99). Most importantly, results revealed significant differences between levels 0, 1 and 2 for both female and male faces (Level 0 vs. Level 1; Level 0 vs. Level 2; Level 1 vs. Level 2, all ps < .001). Beauty scores for the ASD and its matched control group were compared using similar analyses (three-way ANOVA including Group (HFA, CTR) as between-subjects factor and Face Gender (female, male) and Level (0, 1, and 2) as withinsubjects factors). Results revealed a significant main effect of Level [F(2, 68) = 241.91, p < .001] and significant Group  Level [F(2, 68) = .77, p < .001] and Gender  Level [F(2, 68) = 5.31, p < .01] interactions. The triple interaction Group  Face Gender  Level was also found significant [F(2, 68) = 5.95, p < .005]. However, further post hoc comparisons revealed no between-group differences for any of the conditions (MASD_female_Level0 = .46, SD = .08; MCTR_female_Level0 = .26, SD = .09, p > .99; MASD_female_Level1 = .69, SD = .09; MCTR_female_Level1 = .59, SD = .09, p > 1.00; MASD_female_Level2 = 1.51, SD = .11; MCTR_female_Level2 = .1.50, SD = .10, p > 1.00; MASD_male_Level0 = .58, SD = .09; MCTR_male_Level0 = .21, SD = .09, p > .95; MASD_male_Level1 = .85, SD = .10; MCTR_male_Level1 = .58, SD = .10, p > .99; MASD_male_Level2 = 1.24, SD = .07; MCTR_male_Level2 = 1.49, SD = .08, p > .99). In addition, results revealed significant differences between levels 0, 1 and 2 for female and male faces for both groups (all ps < .05). Further analyses on mean scores for each participant were conducted, using a two-way ANOVA including Group (HFA, CTR) as between-subjects factor and Face Gender (Female, Male) as within-subjects factor, to confirm the absence of between-group differences on beauty ratings. Results revealed no significant main effects of Group [F(1, 34) = 1.16, p > .28] or Gender [F(1, 34) = 1.15, p > .70], nor a significant Group  Gender interaction [F(1, 34) = 1.14, p > .70]. 3.2. Stereotypes in typical and atypical development In order determine how deviant friendliness and intelligence ratings were from beauty ratings we have calculated difference scores (beauty minus friendliness and beauty minus intelligence) for each stimulus, for each participant in each condition. These scores were considered in absolute terms (no negative values). In this case, a deviance score of zero indicated that the participant rated a face as friendly or intelligent as he/she had rated it beautiful, whereas a consistency score of two indicated a friendliness or intelligence rating opposite to the beauty rating (e.g., the participant rated face Y as not friendly in Task A and as very beautiful in Task C). Mean deviant scores were then calculated for each participant in each task. Overall results indicated that all the three groups rated friendliness and intelligence consistently with their beauty ratings, with mean deviance scores of .26 (SD = .12) for the TD group, of .27 (SD = .18) for the ASD group and of .28 (SD = .12) for the matched control group. In order to further track this hypothesis we have conducted paired t-tests for each group and condition separately, comparing deviance scores to one, which theoretically may indicate the breakthrough between an attractiveness-based and an attractiveness-independent rating. Results revealed significant differences for both groups in all

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Fig. 1. Deviance scores for friendliness and intelligence ratings of female (F) and male (M) faces for the TD, the HFA and the CTR groups.

the conditions (all ps < .001), with all deviance scores being inferior to one (see Fig. 1). These results indicate that the judgements children with HFA do about a person’s friendliness and intelligence are consistent with their judgements on how beautiful that person is, as it is the case for typically developing children. Further analyses on mean deviant scores were conducted comparing the HFA and its matched control group using a twoway ANOVA including Group (HFA, CTR) as between-subjects factor and Face Gender (female, male) as within-subjects factor for each condition separately. No significant main effects of Faces Gender were found for both friendliness [F(1, 34) = .57, p > .45] and intelligence [F(1, 70) = .15, p > .70] conditions. Most importantly for the purpose of this study, neither the main effect of Group [friendliness: F(1, 34) = .01, p > .93; intelligence: F(1, 34) = .00, p = 1.00] nor the Group  Face Gender interaction were significant [friendliness: F(1, 34) = .17, p > .67; intelligence: F(1, 34) = .05, p > .81]. Taken together, these results indicate that participants with HFA made friendliness and intelligence judgements as their matched controls, independent of the task and the gender of the faces. 4. Discussion The present study aimed at investigating whether children with HFA, as typically developing individuals, show the socalled BIG stereotype (e.g., Dion et al., 1972). Before examining the existence or not of the BIG stereotype it was important to ensure that children could sort and organize faces into distinctive categories: ugly, average and beautiful. Findings of this study confirmed that all children, including those with HFA, categorized faces as expected, i.e., as well as 65 typically developing adults who took part in a preliminary study to validate the stimuli used in the current study. This corroborates previous reports (e.g., Slater, Bremner, et al., 2000) showing that judgements of attractiveness are stable over the course of development Furthermore, significant differences between ratings of ugly vs. average and average vs. beautiful faces were found for all groups. In the case of the TD group increased ratings for female relative to male faces were found. Given that only male participants were included in this study, this finding may reflect the so-called adaptation for mate choice effect on judgements of facial beauty (for reviews see Cornwell et al., 2006; Rhodes, 2006). Such a face-gender effect was, however, not found for the other two groups (HFA and CTR), which have shown no differences in their ratings of male and female faces. Indeed, controversy exists on whether judgements of facial beauty are merely a by-product of general information processing mechanisms (e.g., Cornwell et al., 2004; Ghirlanda, Jannson, & Enquist, 2002). This latest hypothesis has received support by a recent study showing that preference for attractive faces extends beyond conspecifics, being found in 3-to-4 month olds presented with animal faces (Quinn, Kelly, Lee, Pascalis, & Slater, 2008). Studies on facial beauty indeed suggest that the perception of beauty is innate (e.g., Slater et al., 1998) and universal across culture and race (e.g., Jones & Hill, 1993; Perrett, May, & Yoshikawa, 1994).

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Importantly, for the purpose of this study, children with HFA have been found to be able to judge faces on beauty as well as their matched typical controls. Although one previous study has reported a similar finding (White, Hill, Winston, & Frith, 2006), given the widespread difficulties children with autism have across areas of face processing, this finding is surprising. Children with autism show reduced interest in people’s faces (e.g., Kikuchi, Senju, Tojo, Osanai, & Hasegawa, 2009), struggle on face recognition (e.g., Pellicano, Jeffery, Burr, & Rhodes, 2007), face discrimination tasks (e.g., Wolf et al., 2008), rely on atypical strategies to process faces (e.g., Deruelle et al., 2008) and fail to activate the brain areas typically involved in face processing (e.g., Pierce, Mu¨ller, Ambrose, Allen, & Courchesne, 2001). In particular, the fact that HFA individuals are generally local rather configural face ‘‘processors’’ (e.g., Deruelle et al., 2008) could have influenced their beauty judgements. It has been suggested that configural processing is involved in the perception of facial attractiveness, trustworthiness and intelligence, which appear to be affected when faces are displayed inverted (e.g., Santos & Young, 2008). In addition, some studies argue that facial symmetry (also putatively involving configural processing) plays a role in beauty judgements (e.g., Rhodes, Proffitt, Grady, & Sumich, 1998). Given atypical face processing in HFA, it could be that their beauty categorization boundaries were different from those of typically developing matched controls. However, our findings, in line with those of White et al. (2006) on adults with HFA, indicate that children with HFA categorize faces as ugly, average or beautiful just as typically developing children do. Moreover, it is important to note that in the current study the presence of a BIG stereotype was inferred from each subject own judgement of beauty, and not from a normative score. In this case, even if our HFA participants relied on different perceptual strategies to make beauty judgements this would not preclude conclusions on the existence of a BIG stereotype in this group. Regarding the propensity to make stereotypes in typical development, findings of this study revealed that not only the beauty is good but also the ugly is bad. This bi-directionality of the stereotype was found independent of the gender of faces and of the domain of judgement. Clearly, results for 71 children indicated that they judge both male and female beautiful faces as friendly and intelligent and those ugly as unfriendly and not intelligent. These findings are in line with previous evidence for a positive bias in the judgement of attractive faces (see Langlois et al., 2000 for a review) as well with recent more findings showing a negative bias in the judgement of unattractive faces (Griffin & Langlois, 2006). What one might not expect, given the likelihood that social knowledge is involved in this type of stereotypes, is that children with autism would also be subject to it. Indeed, as mentioned above, they show reduced interest in social information, in particular that conveyed by faces (see Grelotti et al., 2002). Yet, findings of this study revealed that children with autism do make social stereotypes, even when those are based on facial information solely. Importantly, they were asked to rate the same faces on friendliness and intelligence before making the attractiveness judgements, rendering the possibility that they were aware of the bias expected unlikely. Rather, their judgements of beauty were coherent with those they have made regarding how friendly and intelligent these faces appeared, indicating a bias towards categorizing people as a function of their attractiveness. As typical children did, those with autism showed a positive bias in the judgement of attractive faces, as well a negative bias for unattractive faces. It seems thus that beauty faces are good and ugly ones are bad for them too. Evidence for the BIG stereotype in autism is not only striking given the social behavioural and cognitive impairments characterizing the disorder, but also given the association typically found between beauty and motivated behaviour (e.g., Aharon et al., 2001). Studies in healthy individuals have shown, for instance, that passive viewing of attractive faces activates the reward circuitry, including the medial prefrontal cortex (e.g., Winston, O’Doherty, Kilner, Perrett, & Dolan, 2006) and the nucleus accumbens (e.g., Aharon et al., 2001), suggesting that attractive faces have a stimulus-reward value. Strong theoretical grounds support the hypothesis that the amygdala is also involved in coding stimulus-reward value and shows greater responses to attractive and unattractive faces compared to middle-ranked faces (e.g., Winston et al., 2006). To our knowledge, the neural substrates of facial attractiveness have not yet been investigated in autism. While findings of the current study indicate that individuals with autism judge attractiveness, and show stereotypes based on these judgements, just like typically developing individuals, they do not mean that individuals with autism rely on the same neural mechanisms as typical developing individuals to do it. Evidence for abnormal activation of the reward circuitry (e.g., Schmitz et al., 2008), as well as evidence for abnormal amygdalar function in autism (for a review see Amaral, Schumann, & Nordahl, 2008), make us rather suspect that facial attractiveness and related social judgements in autism may occur via a deviant pathway. Yet, this hypothesis needs further investigation. The relationship between areas responsive for attractive vs. unattractive faces, those involved in the use of attractiveness judgements to make social stereotypes, and levels of social disability in autism would also need to be investigated in future studies. Together with evidence suggesting that children with autism make judgements based on race and gender stereotypes (Hirschfeld et al., 2007), findings of this study indicate that the use of stereotypes is functional in autism. These findings thus challenge the modular view of social cognition, as well as the idea that autism is characterized by global social impairment. Unravelling the spared and impaired components of social cognition in neurodevelopmental disorders is one of the endeavours of research in social neuroscience in the next years. Finally, by showing that children with autism can acquire and make use of social knowledge, this study may contribute to the development of intervention programs, focusing not only on impaired but also on spared social competences. Acknowledgements We are grateful to all the participants and their parents, as well as to Marine Phan for help with testing.

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