Typically developing adults are able to keep track of story characters' emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these processes in autistic adults, since previous research has demonstrated socio‐emotional difficulties among autistic people, which may lead to problems processing irony and its related emotional processes despite an intact ability to integrate language in context. We recorded eye movements from autistic and nonautistic adults while they read narratives in which a character (the victim) was either criticized in an ironic or a literal manner by another character (the protagonist). A target sentence then either described the victim as feeling hurt/amused by the comment, or the protagonist as having intended to hurt/amused the victim by making the comment. Results from the nonautistic adults broadly replicated the key findings from Filik et al., supporting the two‐stage account. Importantly, the autistic adults did not show comparable two‐stage processing of ironic language; they did not differentiate between the emotional responses for victims or protagonists following ironic versus literal criticism. These findings suggest that autistic people experience a specific difficulty taking into account other peoples' communicative intentions (i.e., infer their mental state) to appropriately anticipate emotional responses to an ironic comment. We discuss how these difficulties might link to atypical socio‐emotional processing in autism, and the ability to maintain successful real‐life social interactions. Autism Res 2020, 13: 563–578. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

中文翻译：

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自闭症和非自闭症成年人的讽刺与文字批评的情感处理：来自眼动追踪的证据。

通常，发展中的成年人能够在阅读时在线跟踪故事人物的情绪状态。Filik等。表明参与者最初希望受讽刺性评论伤害的对象远胜于书面表达，但后来认为受害人的伤害较小。具有讽刺意味的评论被认为更有趣。我们研究了自闭症成年人的这些过程，因为先前的研究表明自闭症患者之间存在社会情感上的困难，尽管他们能够在上下文中整合语言，但仍可能导致处理讽刺及其相关情感过程的问题。我们记录了自闭症和非自闭症成年人的眼球运动，而他们阅读的叙述中，一个角色（受害人）被另一个角色（主角）以讽刺或直白的方式批评了。然后，目标句子将受害者描述为受到评论伤害/逗弄，或者主角打算通过发表评论来伤害/逗弄受害者。非自闭症成年人的结果广泛地复制了Filik等人的主要发现，支持了两阶段研究。重要的是，自闭症的成年人并没有表现出可比的两个阶段的讽刺性语言处理。他们没有区别讽刺性批评和直言不讳的批评对受害者或主角的情感反应。这些发现表明，自闭症患者在考虑其他人的交流意图（即推断其心理状态）以适当预期对讽刺性评论的情感反应时会遇到特定的困难。Autism Res 2020，13：563-578。©2020国际自闭症研究协会，Wiley Periodicals，Inc.。