Abstract
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 develo** 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.
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Acknowledgments
The funding was provided by MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (13YJC190020), Peak Discipline Construction Project of Education at ECNU. The thesis is the initial result of the project “Selective impairment of expression processing in children with autism spectrum disorder” supported by Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Plan.
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YS and YH: conceived and designed the experiments. YS: performed the experiments. YS: analyzed the data. YS and YH: wrote the paper. YS and YH: revised the paper.
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Song, Y., Hakoda, Y. Selective Impairment of Basic Emotion Recognition in People with Autism: Discrimination Thresholds for Recognition of Facial Expressions of Varying Intensities. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 1886–1894 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3428-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3428-2