Diminished sensitivity and specificity at recognising facial emotional expressions of varying intensity underlie emotion-specific recognition deficits in autism spectrum disorders |
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| Institution: | 1. School of Psychology, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Semenyih, 43500 Selangor, Malaysia;2. Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia;3. School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom;1. School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia;2. Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA;1. Graduate School of Medicine, Faculty of Human Health Science, Kyoto University, 53 Shogoin Kawahara-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8507, Japan;2. The Hakubi Project, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi 484-8506, Japan;3. The Organization of Promoting Developmental Disorder Research, 40 Shogoin Sannou-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8392, Japan;1. University Hospital Zurich, Department of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine, University of Zurich, Switzerland;2. Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Psychiatric Hospital, University of Zurich, Switzerland;3. Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Centre of Biology and Health Sciences, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Sao Paulo, Brazil;1. Schizophrenia Research Division, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, New York;2. Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, New York |
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| Abstract: | 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. |
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| Keywords: | Facial emotion recognition ASD Subtle expressions Varying expression intensity Sensitivity Error analysis |
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