Can children with autistic spectrum disorders extract emotions out of contextual cues?

The aim of the present study was to determine whether children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are able to recognize facial expressions of emotion and objects missing on the basis of contextual cues. While most of these studies focused on facial emotion recognition, here we examined the ability to extract emotional information on the basis contextual cues. Nineteen children and adolescents with ASD were asked to recognize emotions and objects (control condition) masked within visual scenes and their performance was compared to that of 19 typically developing controls matched on chronological age and gender. Results revealed that children with ASD were able to use contextual cues to recognize objects but not emotions. Findings of this study are discussed within the framework of specific emotional processing deficits in ASD.     

Selective Impairment of Basic Emotion Recognition in People with Autism: Discrimination Thresholds for Recognition of Facial Expressions of Varying Intensities

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by early onset qualitative impairments in reciprocal social development. However, whether individuals with ASD exhibit impaired recognition of facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions is debatable. To investigate subtle deficits in facial emotion recognition, we asked 14 children diagnosed with high-functioning autism (HFA)/AS and 17 typically developing peers to complete a new highly sensitive test of facial emotion recognition. The test stimuli comprised faces expressing increasing degrees of emotional intensity that slowly changed from a neutral to a full-intensity happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, or fear expression. We assessed individual differences in the intensity of stimuli required to make accurate judgments about emotional expressions. We found that, different emotions had different identification thresholds and the two groups were generally similar in terms of the sequence of discrimination threshold of six basic expressions. It was easier for individuals in both groups to identify emotions that were relatively fully expressed (e.g., intensity >?50%). Compared with control participants, children with ASD generally required stimuli with significantly greater intensity for the correct identification of anger, disgust, and fear expressions. These results suggest that individuals with ASD do not have a general but rather a selective impairment in basic emotion recognition.     

Detecting subtle facial emotion recognition deficits in high-functioning Autism using dynamic stimuli of varying intensities

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are characterised by social and communication impairment, yet evidence for deficits in the ability to recognise facial expressions of basic emotions is conflicting. Many studies reporting no deficits have used stimuli that may be too simple (with associated ceiling effects), for example, 100% ‘full-blown’ expressions. In order to investigate subtle deficits in facial emotion recognition, 21 adolescent males with high-functioning Austism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and 16 age and IQ matched typically developing control males completed a new sensitive test of facial emotion recognition which uses dynamic stimuli of varying intensities of expressions of the six basic emotions (Emotion Recognition Test; Montagne et al., 2007). Participants with ASD were found to be less accurate at processing the basic emotional expressions of disgust, anger and surprise; disgust recognition was most impaired - at 100% intensity and lower levels, whereas recognition of surprise and anger were intact at 100% but impaired at lower levels of intensity.     

Altered right frontal cortical connectivity during facial emotion recognition in children with autism spectrum disorders

A growing body of evidence suggests that autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is associated with altered functional connectivity of the brain and with impairment in recognizing others’ emotions. To better understand the relationships among these neural and behavioral abnormalities, we examined cortical connectivity which was indicated by theta coherence during tasks of facial emotion recognition in 18 children with ASD and 18 typically developing (TD) children who were between 6 and 18 years of age. We found that the children with ASD had general impairment in recognizing facial emotions, after controlling for response bias. Additionally, we found that the TD children demonstrated significant modulation of right frontal theta coherence in response to emotional faces compared to neutral faces, whereas children with ASD did not exhibit any modulation of theta coherence. The extent of modulation of theta coherence to emotions was further found to be related to the severity of social impairments in ASD. Our findings of a general impairment in facial emotion recognition and the involvement of disordered cortical connectivity in social deficits in children with ASD have shed light for future exploration of interventions regarding emotional processing and social functioning in ASD.     

Intermodal matching of emotional expressions in young children with autism

This study examined the ability of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to detect affective correspondences between facial and vocal expressions of emotion using an intermodal matching paradigm. Four-year-old children with ASD (n = 18) and their age-matched normally developing peers (n = 18) were presented pairs of videotaped facial expressions accompanied by a single soundtrack matching the affect of one of the two facial expressions. In one block of trials, the emotions were portrayed by their mothers; in another block of trials, the same emotion pairs were portrayed by an unfamiliar woman. Findings showed that ASD children were able to detect the affective correspondence between facial and vocal expressions of emotion portrayed by their mothers, but not a stranger. Furthermore, in a control condition using inanimate objects and their sounds, ASD children also showed a preference for sound-matched displays. These results suggest that children with ASD do not have a general inability to detect intermodal correspondences between visual and vocal events, however, their ability to detect affective correspondences between facial and vocal expressions of emotions may be limited to familiar displays.     

Recognition of facial expressions of emotion by persons with mental retardation. A matched comparison study.

Children and adults with mental retardation were tested on their ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion. The sample consisted of 80 children and adults with mental retardation and a control group of 80 nonhandicapped children matched on mental age and gender. Ekman and Friesen's normed photographs of the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) were used in a recognition task of facial expressions. Subjects were individually read two-sentence stories identifying a specific emotion, presented with a randomized array of the six photographs of the basic facial expressions of emotion, and then asked to select the photograph that depicted the emotion identified in the story. This procedure was repeated with 24 different stories, with each of the six basic emotions being represented four times. Results showed that, as a group, individuals with mental retardation were not as proficient as their mental-age-matched nonhandicapped control subjects at recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Although adults with mild mental retardation were more proficient at this task than those with moderate mental retardation, this finding was not true for children. There was a modest difference between the children with moderate mental retardation and their nonhandicapped matched controls in their ability to recognize facial expression of disgust.     

Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Relations to Eye Gaze and Autonomic State

Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), heart rate, and accuracy and latency of emotion recognition were evaluated in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically developing children while viewing videos of faces slowly transitioning from a neutral expression to one of six basic emotions (e.g., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). Children with ASD were slower in emotion recognition and selectively made more errors in detecting anger. ASD children had lower amplitude RSA and faster heart rate. Within the ASD group, children with higher amplitude RSA recognized emotions faster. Less severe ASD symptoms and increased gaze to the eye region in children with ASD were related to more accurate emotion recognition.     

Neural correlates of facial affect processing in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder

OBJECTIVE: To examine the neural basis of impairments in interpreting facial emotions in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). METHOD: Twelve children and adolescents with ASD and 12 typically developing (TD) controls matched faces by emotion and assigned a label to facial expressions while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. RESULTS: Both groups engaged similar neural networks during facial emotion processing, including activity in the fusiform gyrus (FG) and prefrontal cortex. However, between-group analyses in regions of interest revealed that when matching facial expressions, the ASD group showed significantly less activity than the TD group in the FG, but reliably greater activity in the precuneus. During the labeling of facial emotions, no between-group differences were observed at the behavioral or neural level. Furthermore, activity in the amygdala was moderated by task demands in the TD group but not in the ASD group. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that children and adolescents with ASD in part recruit different neural networks and rely on different strategies when processing facial emotions. High-functioning individuals with ASD may be relatively unimpaired in the cognitive assessment of basic emotions, yet still show differences in the automatic processing of facial expressions.     

Brief Report: Accuracy and Response Time for the Recognition of Facial Emotions in a Large Sample of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

The empirical literature has presented inconsistent evidence for deficits in the recognition of basic emotion expressions in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which may be due to the focus on research with relatively small sample sizes. Additionally, it is proposed that although children with ASD may correctly identify emotion expression they rely on more deliberate, more time-consuming strategies in order to accurately recognize emotion expressions when compared to typically developing children. In the current study, we examine both emotion recognition accuracy and response time in a large sample of children, and explore the moderating influence of verbal ability on these findings. The sample consisted of 86 children with ASD (M _age = 10.65) and 114 typically developing children (M _age = 10.32) between 7 and 13 years of age. All children completed a pre-test (emotion word–word matching), and test phase consisting of basic emotion recognition, whereby they were required to match a target emotion expression to the correct emotion word; accuracy and response time were recorded. Verbal IQ was controlled for in the analyses. We found no evidence of a systematic deficit in emotion recognition accuracy or response time for children with ASD, controlling for verbal ability. However, when controlling for children’s accuracy in word–word matching, children with ASD had significantly lower emotion recognition accuracy when compared to typically developing children. The findings suggest that the social impairments observed in children with ASD are not the result of marked deficits in basic emotion recognition accuracy or longer response times. However, children with ASD may be relying on other perceptual skills (such as advanced word–word matching) to complete emotion recognition tasks at a similar level as typically developing children.     

Rôle de la flexibilité cognitive dans la reconnaissance d’expressions émotionnelles chez les personnes atteintes de Troubles du Spectre Autistique

The present research tested whether young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) shows impaired recognition of basic-emotion expressions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust) and the same emotions embedded in a social background (i.e. simple versus complex facial emotion recognition), compared with typically developing (TD) children. Moreover, we investigated whether cognitive flexibility could be linked with these faces processing skills. Our results showed that performance in ASD children was similar to the group of TD children for simple emotion recognition whereas TD children outperformed ASDs children in the complex task. In the second part, our study tends to confirm a link between cognitive flexibility and faces processing skills in children with ASD, especially when different contextual cues are present to extract facial emotion. We confirm previous findings demonstrating that individuals with ASDs use an effortful “systematizing” process to recognize emotion expressions, whereas TD individuals use a more holistic process. These results are discussed within the context of current neuropsychological studies on “weak central coherence”, hyper-systemizing theory, and lack of cognitive flexibility in ASD.     

Diminished sensitivity and specificity at recognising facial emotional expressions of varying intensity underlie emotion-specific recognition deficits in autism spectrum disorders

BackgroundA plethora of research on facial emotion recognition in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exists and reported deficits in ASD compared to controls, particularly for negative basic emotions. However, these studies have largely used static high intensity stimuli. The current study investigated facial emotion recognition across three levels of expression intensity from videos, looking at accuracy rates to investigate impairments in facial emotion recognition and error patterns (’confusions’) to explore potential underlying factors.MethodTwelve individuals with ASD (9 M/3F; M(age) = 17.3) and 12 matched controls (9 M/3F; M(age) = 16.9) completed a facial emotion recognition task including 9 emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, happiness, contempt, embarrassment, pride) and neutral, each expressed by 12 encoders at low, intermediate, and high intensity.ResultsA facial emotion recognition deficit was found overall for the ASD group compared to controls, as well as deficits in recognising individual negative emotions at varying expression intensities. Compared to controls, the ASD group showed significantly more, albeit typical, confusions between emotion categories (at high intensity), and significantly more confusions of emotions as ‘neutral’ (at low intensity).ConclusionsThe facial emotion recognition deficits identified in ASD, particularly for negative emotions, are in line with previous studies using other types of stimuli. Error analysis showed that individuals with ASD had difficulties detecting emotional information in the face (sensitivity) at low intensity, and correctly identifying emotional information (specificity) at high intensity. These results suggest different underlying mechanisms for the facial emotion recognition deficits at low vs high expression intensity.     

Diminished Sensitivity to Sad Facial Expressions in High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders is Associated with Symptomatology and Adaptive Functioning

Prior studies implicate facial emotion recognition (FER) difficulties among individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD); however, many investigations focus on FER accuracy alone and few examine ecological validity through links with everyday functioning. We compared FER accuracy and perceptual sensitivity (from neutral to full expression) between 42 adolescents with high functioning (IQ > 80) ASD and 31 typically developing adolescents (matched on age, IQ, sex ratio) across six basic emotions and examined links between FER and symptomatology/adaptive functioning within the ASD group. Adolescents with ASD required more intense facial expressions for accurate emotion identification. Controlling for this overall group difference revealed particularly diminished sensitivity to sad facial expressions in ASD, which was uniquely correlated with ratings of autism-related behavior and adaptive functioning.     

Impaired facial emotion recognition and reduced amygdalar volume in schizophrenia

Structural abnormalities of the amygdala and impaired facial emotion recognition have been reported in schizophrenia. Most studies demonstrated reduced amygdalar volumes in schizophrenia patients, and difficulty in recognizing negative facial emotions has also been reported. However, findings on the deficit in facial emotion recognition have been inconsistent, and the relationships between this impairment and amygdalar volume reduction remain unclear. In this study, we investigated these relationships by performing volumetric analysis of the amygdala and evaluation of facial emotion recognition performance in the same subjects with schizophrenia. The sample group comprised 20 schizophrenia patients and 20 matched healthy controls. We measured the volumes of the amygdalae with high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 3.0 Tesla. Additionally, we included a task that evaluated the subjects' ability to recognize the intensity of basic facial emotions. We found that impaired facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia patients is emotion-specific (sadness, surprise, disgust, and anger). Moreover, the volume of each amygdala on either side of the brain was reduced. Finally, we found a correlation between left amygdalar volume and the recognition of sadness in facial expressions. This study demonstrated that amygdala dysfunction may contribute to impaired facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia.     

Impairment in face processing in autism spectrum disorder: a developmental perspective

Findings on face identity and facial emotion recognition in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are inconclusive. Moreover, little is known about the developmental trajectory of face processing skills in ASD. Taking a developmental perspective, the aim of this study was to extend previous findings on face processing skills in a sample of adolescents and adults with ASD. N = 38 adolescents and adults (13–49 years) with high-functioning ASD and n = 37 typically developing (TD) control subjects matched for age and IQ participated in the study. Moreover, n = 18 TD children between the ages of 8 and 12 were included to address the question whether face processing skills in ASD follow a delayed developmental pattern. Face processing skills were assessed using computerized tasks of face identity recognition (FR) and identification of facial emotions (IFE). ASD subjects showed impaired performance on several parameters of the FR and IFE task compared to TD control adolescents and adults. Whereas TD adolescents and adults outperformed TD children in both tasks, performance in ASD adolescents and adults was similar to the group of TD children. Within the groups of ASD and control adolescents and adults, no age-related changes in performance were found. Our findings corroborate and extend previous studies showing that ASD is characterised by broad impairments in the ability to process faces. These impairments seem to reflect a developmentally delayed pattern that remains stable throughout adolescence and adulthood.     

Recognition of emotion from moving facial and prosodic stimuli in depressed patients

BACKGROUND: It has been suggested that depressed patients have a "negative bias" in recognising other people's emotions; however, the detailed structure of this negative bias is not fully understood. OBJECTIVES: To examine the ability of depressed patients to recognise emotion, using moving facial and prosodic expressions of emotion. METHODS: 16 depressed patients and 20 matched (non-depressed) controls selected one basic emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, or disgust) that best described the emotional state represented by moving face and prosody. RESULTS: There was no significant difference between depressed patients and controls in their recognition of facial expressions of emotion. However, the depressed patients were impaired relative to controls in their recognition of surprise from prosodic emotions, judging it to be more negative. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest that depressed patients tend to interpret neutral emotions, such as surprise, as negative. Considering that the deficit was seen only for prosodic emotive stimuli, it would appear that stimulus clarity influences the recognition of emotion. These findings provide valuable information on how depressed patients behave in complicated emotional and social situations.     

Understanding of facial expressions of emotion by children with intellectual disabilities of differing aetiology

Background Interpreting emotional expressions is a socio‐cognitive skill central to interpersonal interaction. Poor emotion recognition has been reported in autism but is less well understood in other kinds of intellectual disabilities (ID), with procedural differences making comparisons across studies and syndromes difficult. This study aimed to compare directly facial emotion recognition skills in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS), Down's syndrome (DS) and non‐specific intellectual disability (NSID), contrasting ability and error profiles with those of typically developing (TD) children of equivalent cognitive and linguistic status. Methods Sixty children participated in the study: 15 FXS, 15 DS, 15 NSID and 15 TD children. Standardised measures of cognitive, language and socialisation skills were collected for all children, along with measures of performance on two photo‐matching tasks: an ‘identity‐matching’ task (to control for basic face‐processing ability) and an ‘emotion‐matching’ task (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear or disgust). Results Identity‐matching ability did not differ across the four child groups. Only the DS group performed significantly more poorly on the emotion‐matching task and only in comparison to the TD group, with fear recognition an area of particular difficulty. Conclusion Findings support previous evidence of emotion recognition abilities commensurate with overall developmental level in children with FXS or NSID, but not DS. They also suggest, however, that syndrome‐specific difficulties may be subtle and detectable, at least in smaller‐scale studies, only in comparison with TD matches, and not always across syndromes. Implications for behavioural phenotype theory, educational interventions and future research are discussed.     

How do Typically Developing Deaf Children and Deaf Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Use the Face When Comprehending Emotional Facial Expressions in British Sign Language?

Facial expressions in sign language carry a variety of communicative features. While emotion can modulate a spoken utterance through changes in intonation, duration and intensity, in sign language specific facial expressions presented concurrently with a manual sign perform this function. When deaf adult signers cannot see facial features, their ability to judge emotion in a signed utterance is impaired (Reilly et al. in Sign Lang Stud 75:113–118, 1992). We examined the role of the face in the comprehension of emotion in sign language in a group of typically developing (TD) deaf children and in a group of deaf children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We replicated Reilly et al.’s (Sign Lang Stud 75:113–118, 1992) adult results in the TD deaf signing children, confirming the importance of the face in understanding emotion in sign language. The ASD group performed more poorly on the emotion recognition task than the TD children. The deaf children with ASD showed a deficit in emotion recognition during sign language processing analogous to the deficit in vocal emotion recognition that has been observed in hearing children with ASD.     

Facial recognition in primary focal dystonia.

The basal ganglia seem to be involved in emotional processing. Primary dystonia is a movement disorder considered to result from basal ganglia dysfunction, and the aim of the present study was to investigate emotion recognition in patients with primary focal dystonia. Thirty-two patients with primary cranial (n=12) and cervical (n=20) dystonia were compared to 32 healthy controls matched for age, sex, and educational level on the facially expressed emotion labeling (FEEL) test, a computer-based tool measuring a person's ability to recognize facially expressed emotions. Patients with cognitive impairment or depression were excluded. None of the patients received medication with a possible cognitive side effect profile and only those with mild to moderate dystonia were included. Patients with primary dystonia showed isolated deficits in the recognition of disgust (P=0.007), while no differences between patients and controls were found with regard to the other emotions (fear, happiness, surprise, sadness, and anger). The findings of the present study add further evidence to the conception that dystonia is not only a motor but a complex basal ganglia disorder including selective emotion recognition disturbances.     

Computer-based intervention for inferring facial expressions from the socio-emotional context in two children with autism spectrum disorders

Difficulties in understanding others’ emotions have been widely reported in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Many methodologies for evaluating the emotion recognition can be analyzed by matching-to-sample (MTS) procedures. When using movies of socio-emotional situations as sample stimuli, children with ASD have been found to have difficulties in understanding them. Furthermore, there are few intervention studies that have targeted understanding of socio-emotional situations in children with ASD. The present study examined whether two young children with ASD can acquire the relationships between movies of socio-emotional situations and pictures of facial expressions through computer-based MTS training. The movies of situations and pictures of facial expressions represented happy, surprised, angry and sad emotions. The child with ASD was required to select the picture of facial expression when presented with the movie of socio-emotional situations as a sample stimulus, and if so, whether these skills can be generalized to untrained stimuli. We used a multiple baseline design across participants, and the results demonstrated that both children learned the relationships and improved their performance with untrained stimuli. These findings are discussed in terms of procedures to increase the understanding of others’ emotions at an early developmental stage.