CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Introduction: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neuropsychiatric condition characterized by severe deficits in emotional and social functioning. Although the study of social cognition and its neural correlates in ASD has received considerable interest in recent years, few works have addressed a fundamental aspect of human interaction such as social emotions (i.e. those that are triggered by the presence or interaction with others). In this study, we aimed to fill that gap by exploring how ASD patients experience envy and Schadenfreude (pleasure at others? misfortune), two social emotions that constitute counter-empathic responses and therefore can negatively impact interpersonal relationships. Methods: We administered a novel ecological paradigm to 15 adults with ASD and 15 healthy controls (HC) matched in age, gender, IQ, language abilities, and level of education. Subjects had to read short sentences describing different fortunate and unfortunate events that happened to different characters, and rate how much envy and pleasure they felt, respectively. Neutral events were used as control condition. We used SPSS to compare the behavioral performance between patients and HC in the task. Additionally, we obtained magnetic resonance imaging recordings from all subjects. Using MATLAB and SPM, we performed voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis to explore the neuroanatomical correlates of envy and Schadenfreude in ASD. Results: As expected, ASD patients reported significantly lower levels of envy and Schadenfreude when compared to HC. Groups did not differed in their ratings of neutral events. VBM analysis revealed a positive correlation between levels of Schadenfreude and the gray matter volume of the middle-frontal gyrus (BA 6), the precuneus (BA 5) and the inferior parietal lobule (BA 40). These results survived after including measures of executive functioning and anxiety as nuisance covariates (p