Uso de la risa como elemento preverbal en personas con trastorno del espectro del autismo, personas neurotípicas y simiosuna revisión de ideas y conceptos

Laburpena

Laughter is a key communicative element that has been with us as a species since our ancestors. Knowing its functioning and meaning in depth requires both an understanding of the evolutionary process of hominins, as well as comparative analyzes between humans without communicative impairment and those in whom, regardless of whether they are verbal or non-verbal, their communication is altered. In this sense, a privileged group of study are autistic people whose pragmatic and social communication is one of the central cores that define them. The objective we set with this research is the understanding of laughter as a preverbal element. Since we do not have other hominins with which to compare our own behavior, studies have been focused from different points of view. In numerous comparative studies, different languages and their own associated gestures, both facial and corporal, have been confronted; Other works try to find parallels between our closest primate relatives (great apes) and humans, and it is possible to find numerous works that address the issue of the origin of articulate language from the evolutionary perspectives of Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, etc Our research is based on narrowing down a single element, laughter. From this approach, and thanks to the previously mentioned studies, we include a novelty: focusing on the differences and not on the confluences. Thus, within people with disabilities or limitations to communicate orally, we take the group called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and we try to understand whether their use of laughter differs or not from that of neurotypical people and if this is closer that of our ape relatives, with which we would implicitly be showing that laughter would be a preverbal element that would help both to understand the origin of articulate language and to communicate with the people themselves within the Spectrum. We make an exhaustive review of ideas and concepts around laughter in primates and humans, with emphasis on the ASD world and we analyze the meaning of laughter through an analysis of our own data obtained through a questionnaire designed by the author. The total sample of participants (n = 365) is divided into preverbal autistic people (n = 269), verbal autistic people (n = 46) and normotypical control sample (n = 50). Our preliminary results show that there are significant differences in the communicative functionality of laughter in verbal and non-verbal autistic people with respect to the control group. There are no significant differences (p < 0.001) between verbal and non-verbal autistic people. The differences found are based on the domains of behavior, perception and feelings. A final section, called nomenclature, will help us take the pulse of how people and families affected by the use of one or another term feel when talking about autism.