ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Language Communication
Autistic and neurotypical variance in the appraisal of emotional and interoceptive words
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universidad de Las Americas, Santiago, Chile
- 2Centro de Investigación CIPAES, Universidad de Las Américas, Santiago, Chile
- 3Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile
- 4Centro de Investigación para la Mejora de los Aprendizajes de la Facultad de Educación (CIMA), Santiago, Chile
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This study investigates how neurotype influences the emotional appraisal of words. A total of 131 Spanish-speaking adults in Chile (63 autistic and 68 neurotypical) rated on a 7-point Likert scale 238 Spanish nouns across six affective dimensions: (a) valence, (b) arousal, (c) subjective frequency, (d) association with depression, (e) association with anxiety, and (f) association with anger. Descriptive statistics and Principal Component Analysis were used to identify differences in lexical-affective ratings. The results revealed consistent group differences in the emotional interpretation of words. Autistic participants tended to assign higher ratings to emotionally intense, concrete, and interoceptively salient terms, particularly those linked to bodily sensations, anxiety, or arousal. Words such as inquietud (uneasiness), ducha (shower), and ansia (craving) were rated as systematically significantly more emotionally charged by autistic participants. In contrast, neurotypical participants favoured abstract, socially embedded terms like admiración (admiration), soledad (loneliness), and decepción (disappointment), which rely more heavily on symbolic inference and social scripts. These differences were especially marked in the anxiety and arousal dimensions, and not explained by alexithymia. Modelling results further confirmed that neurotype predicted systematic variation in ratings across all dimensions, suggesting distinct cognitive-emotional frameworks. The findings support the hypothesis that autistic and neurotypical individuals construct emotional meaning through different experiential systems: one grounded in interoception and perceptual salience, and the other guided by social abstraction. These insights offer implications for inclusive pedagogy, clinical communication, and the design of affective tools in education and therapy. Recognising neurotype-specific emotional semantics may help reduce miscommunication and foster more adaptive and respectful forms of interaction across neurodivergent and neurotypical populations.
Keywords: autism, affective semantics, Emotional lexicon, interoception, lexical categorization, neurodiversity
Received: 28 Jun 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Von Hausen, Larraín Valenzuela, Carcamo and Salgado. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Felipe Von Hausen, fvonhausen@outlook.de
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