Further Exploration of Predicaments

Factual account of Predicaments

Exploration o f performance on this measure may give us some indication o f the points at which social problem solving becomes difficult. The first point o f difference was in the

amount o f prompting required to produce an adequate summary o f the situation. Often the Asperger’s group had retained the information, but had not given it. The difference in prompting may reflect a difference in general between the groups, in the understanding o f the task requirements, or beliefs about what was acutely pertinent to the situation. This is consistent with the finding o f Loveland, Tunali, Kelly & McEvoy (1989), who asked autistic participants to explain the rules o f a board game to a naive listener. They found autistic participants were less efficient than controls. The autistic group being typically less informative, although they could reply correctly when asked specific questions to elicit the missing information.

Solution quality

The Asperger’s group both produced and selected solutions of a poorer quality, and this, as has already been discussed, seemed largely due to impairment in the social appropriateness aspect o f the solution. Participants in both groups o f young people gave responses which were naive, or simply reflected their age and the types o f solutions they could actually complete independently. For example one o f the control group said on a number of occasions he’d, “tell his mum”, which o f course was entirely appropriate for his age and probably quite effective. Other instances like, call a solicitor, or move house, suggested a naivete about how difficult these things might be. However, it was only the Asperger’s group which gave what might be considered bizarre or extreme responses. For example, in the first predicament, a couple are complaining about a neighbours failure to return their lawn mower despite repeated requests for its return. Two, what might be considered extreme or bizarre responses by the Asperger’s group were, “go round and

punch him in the face”, “unweed the plants, sell most o f the flowers and put the ones they liked most back in order”. For the predicament o f a man with new neighbours who own noisy dogs, described in the method section, a number o f bizarre responses were elicited. These examples are from different participants; “swap houses with them, so that he would sleep in their flat”, “sneak into the flat and poison the dogs”, “make them into tonight’s dinner”, “build them a dog house in the back yard, they have big gardens in flats, and “cut off his ears”. Another predicament involved a man knocking on a door and explaining to the woman inside he had noticed some damage to her roof. He suggests she gives him £50 so he can get the materials to fix it. Two unusual responses here were “try and kick him” and “ignore it and die in the winter”. To the predicament o f a couple who had lost their money and therefore could not pay the hotel they were staying in or afford to get home, two responses were “ask people in the street for money, people are usually quite generous”, and “live in alleyways”.

These bizarre responses were not restricted to the Social Predicaments some o f the Non Social Predicaments elicited equally extreme responses. One o f the Non Social Predicaments involved a woman arriving home from work. She is preparing a meal and looking forward to the evenings television, when there is a power cut. Some suggestions here were “wire the TV to her car through a 12-240 vault transformer”, “use emergency generator” and “get an old bicycle, wire it up to a generator, and peddle”. The predicament o f receiving a doll instead o f the requested game, as described fully in the method, was responded to by one participant with “ask a detective to figure out where the doll came from”. To the predicament o f returning home and finding the place flooded, one solution was “quickly claim it was not his house and go to someone else’s house”. Finally one response to the predicament o f getting a letter, threatening court action for an

unpaid bill, which the character in the story has apparently paid, was “stand up and mark your territory, go to court”.

Selection of solutions

When we look at the actual performance, it seems reasonable to assume that, if the Asperger’s group were generating solutions o f a poorer quality, then the solutions they chose might also be o f a poorer quality. However, when we looked at the relationships between these measures, within Predicaments the Asperger’s group was characterised by different relationships to those o f the control group. As we would expect, in the control group the average quality o f solutions generated correlated with the solution quality o f optimal and personal solutions, when these were considered both separately and together. Further, the correlation was stronger in controls for the optimal solution. This might be expected if one takes into account that what you might chose to do yourself may not necessarily be the best solution, even if you are aware o f better ways to deal with a difficult situation. However, in the Asperger’s group the correlation was only significant between average solution quality and the quality o f the personal solution. There was no significant correlation between the average solution quality and the quality o f the optimal solution. The optimal solution is the choice the participant makes as optimal for the character in the predicament. One reason for the difficulty would be consistent with a mentalising hypothesis, in that the Asperger’s participants found it difficult to imagine what the main character should do. However this doesn’t entirely explain why the quality o f their choice would not be significantly related to the quality o f the solutions they had available. One could speculate that the Asperger’s group are may be evaluating the quality o f their

responses on different criteria. Indeed, whilst the Asperger’s group were significantly poorer on measures o f the quality of their chosen solutions, there were no significant differences between the groups on their ratings o f satisfaction with their solutions.

There was also another difference in the correlations between the groups. Within the control group there was not a significant relationship between the number o f ideas generated and the resultant quality o f the solutions chosen. There was a significant correlation for the Asperger’s group. The explanations for this are not immediately apparent, but are open to speculation. It could simply be, that the more ideas the this group generated reflected a better understanding o f the predicament, and thus a better choice o f solution. In summary one could speculate that the lack o f relationship, between the average solution quality and quality o f the solution chosen for the main character might indicate deficit might be operating, in the judgment o f appropriate and effective competing options.

Finally there were no significant differences between the groups in terms o f the number of solutions generated on the Social Predicaments task, but there were on the Non Social Predicaments task. It is not clear why this would be. When one looks at the means the mean has reduced slightly in the Asperger’s group and increased slightly in the control group on the Non Social task. This implies that the controls found it slightly easier to generate solutions to these predicaments. However the quality o f solutions did not differentiate the groups in this task, one possibility is, that this is actually a less complex task. The lack of correlations between the measures on the two Predicaments tasks suggest it might at least be a different type o f task. The predicaments not may not be equally matched for difficulty, and as such not directly comparable.