The multisensory base of bodily coupling in face-to-face social interactions: Contrasting the case of autism with the Möbius syndrome

ABSTRACT

The perennial question of how we understand others’ emotions and mental states has undertaken an “interactive turn,” emphasizing the crucial role of low-level bodily coupling and second-personal engagements with others as opposed to the individualistic procedure of mental state attribution or “mindreading.” This raises the important question of what counts as foundational for socio-emotional understanding: high-level mentalistic abilities, low-level bodily coupling, or an integrative combination of both? Recent findings on face-based emotion-recognition in individuals with Möbius syndrome (MS) – a rare form of congenital facial paralysis which prevents facial mimicry – cast doubt on the idea that bodily coupling is the foundational component for socio-emotional understanding. Here we argue that the MS case does not pose a threat to the idea that low-level bodily coupling processes are foundational for social cognition. Rather, despite their lack of automatic facial mirroring, MS patients might benefit from spared multisensory integration processing which allows them to establish alternative channels of bodily coupling via different sensory modalities. We contrast MS- and autistic persons’ lack of automatic facial mimicry and argue that this comparison might help us to shed light on the constitutive and foundational role of low-level bodily coupling for socio-emotional understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Autism spectrum disorder
• bodily coupling
• Möbius syndrome
• multisensory integration
• social cognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The importance of the interactive and reciprocal component in social exchanges and automatic imitation was first emphasized in the developmental literature, which focused on the dynamics of the dyadic attunement between infants and caregivers (Trevarthen, 1979; Murray & Trevarthen, 1985).

2. In the current literature, there are a number of fine-grained distinctions regarding the most accurate interpretation of the interplay between interactionism and more traditional approaches such as (a) Theory of Mind (Premarck & Woodruff, 1978 and (b) Simulation Theory (Gordon, 1986; Gallese 2001; Goldman and Sripada 2005; see Overgaard & Michael, 2015 for a detailed discussion). For the limited purposes of this paper, we will leave aside these controversies and focus instead on the question of whether low-level bodily coupling processes are necessary and sufficient for social cognition.

3. ASD individuals can perceive faces in great detail, while having significant difficulties in perceiving feelings in faces (Hobson & Ouston, 1988).

4. EMG monitors electrical charges in muscle activity over the cheek and brow region.

5. Some theorists propose that imitation in autism involves two different processes and mechanisms: (i) an “affective mechanism” available at birth and modulating social exchanges and (ii) a more “executively constructed, cognitively mediated, intentional imitation system that allows one to learn from instrumental means-end relations from others” (Rogers, Hepburn, Staackhouse, & Wehner, 2003, p. 777).

6. The four aspects of emotional competence are expression, perception, responding, and understanding of an emotion.

7. For a more detailed discussion of the phenomenology of Möbius syndrome embodiment, see Krueger and Henriksen (2016).

8. By contrast, ASD people compensate for their alterations in both the recognition of emotional prosody and the perception of facial emotion by using effortful cognitive strategies based on learned associations and prototypical references to label emotional expressions (Hall, Szechtman, & Nahmias, 2003).

9. In emotion processing, adults with autism showed greater thalamic activation, which is consistent with the suggestion that ASD people process facial stimuli trough a selective analysis of features rather that holistically (Hobson & Ouston, 1988).

10. In a similar vein, Sigman, Kasari, Kwon, and Yirmiya (1992) proposed a possible connection between high-reasoning capacities and good scores on ToM tests in people with autism because they can “take offline” and “calculate” ToM-like inferences and explanations of behaviors. Importantly, the use of these offline strategies seems to have a limited effect, since teaching people with autism about the “rules” of social interaction and perception does not necessarily lead to greater social fluency (Ozonoff, Pennington, & Rogers, 1991).

11. Our hypothesis is in line with a significant body of research which indicates that children come to learn about the social world not from an observer’s perspective, but from interactive and joint attention in collaborative engagements (Moll, Arellano, Guzman, Cordova, & Madrigal, 2015; Moll, Richter, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2008; Moll & Tomasello, 2007; Schilbach et al., 2013).

12. A further consequence would be that there is an explanatory link between: (a) differences in ASD people’s multisensory processing leading to an altered sense of self and other, on the one hand, and (b) their preference for using mentalistic compensatory strategies in establishing online fast emotional responses in real-time social encounters, on the other hand. The over-use of mentalizing strategies in order to cope with atypical self- and other-awareness in bodily coupling processing might slow down rather than improve social understanding in online interactive settings. Notice, importantly, that this doesn’t mean that reflective, individualistic paths to understand others are not efficient at all – rather, these offline strategies take time and are not very successful in real time and social pressure scenarios (see Ciaunica, 2014).

13. Regarding neural processing in ASD, one important idea emerging from neuroimaging data is that autism is a connectivity disorder. In other words, the observed alterations in ASD arise from poorly connected neural networks with nodes unable to effectively transfer and integrate information (Hughes, 2007; see Baum et al., 2015 for a review).

14. PP (predictive processing) is also used as a formal description of how multisensory information integration underpins minimal forms of self-awareness (Limanowski & Blankenburg, 2013).

15. For example, findings by Bogart and colleagues (2012) illustrated that people with congenital facial paralysis use more adaptations to express themselves than people with late acquired facial paralysis. These results are consistent with the aforementioned hypothesis stipulating that the use of compensatory strategies by MS people might emerge against the underlying background of spared bodily coupling processing (e.g., auditory, tactile) – which allows the successful development of later explicit high-level cognitive (i.e., individualistic, reflective) capacities. Further research needs to address the question of whether multisensory integration processing is altered in MS people.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [SFRH/BPD/94566/2013] to AC, Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/L007053/1] to OD, and the Max Planck Society via a grant for an Independent Max Planck Research Group to LS.

Notes on contributors

Anna Ciaunica

Anna Ciaunica is a philosopher and cognitive scientist based at the Institute of Philosophy, Porto and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London – Social Neuroscience group. Her research focuses on the relationship between atypical forms of bodily self-consciousness and socio-emotional understanding in two major conditions: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Depersonalization/Derealisation Disorder (DP/DR). She is currently the Principal Investigator of an interdisciplinary project  – Estranged from Oneself, Estranged from Others: Investigating the Effect of Depersonalisation on Self-Other Mirroring – looking at the mechanisms underlying atypical self-processing and social relatedness in DPD. She has published single- and co-authored work in philosophy of mind, self-consciousness and social cognition.

Leonhard Schilbach

Leonhard Schilbach is the managing consultant psychiatrist, head of the outpatient and day clinic for disorders of social interaction and of the independent Max Planck Research Group for Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. In his interdisciplinary work he focuses on the behavioral and neural mechanisms of social interaction in order to shed new light on psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social interaction. He has published numerous articles in the domain of social neuroscience and psychiatry and has been the recipient of various awards in recognition of the relevance of his work for psychiatry.

Ophelia Deroy

Ophelia Deroy holds the Chair in Philosophy of Mind, at the LMU, and is a member of the Graduate School in Systemic Neuroscience (GSN) in Munich. She is the former deputy director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, where she also held a research position. She specialises in philosophy of mind and cognitive neurosciences, and has widely published on issues related to multisensory perception and social interactions, both in philosophical and scientific journals. Her research looks more particularly at aspects of experience and thought which challenge individuals' capacity for rational justification or even reflective awareness - such as arbitrary inclinations to connect sensory dimensions, or cognitive biases. She is an active promoter and a leading advocate of stronger connections between philosophical and scientific approaches to the mind. Her work is frequently broadcast in national and international newspapers, and she is regularly consulted by institutions and the media regarding the relevance of philosophy for scientific debates