Reading Faces for Information About Words and Emotions in Adolescents with Autism

Overview

Journal Res Autism Spectr Disord

Publisher Elsevier

Date 2009 Oct 8

PMID 19809572

Citations 13

Authors

Ruth B Grossman

Helen Tager-Flusberg

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Studies of explicit processing of facial expressions by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have found a variety of deficits and preserved abilities compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. However, little attention has been paid to their implicit processing abilities for emotional facial expressions. The question has also been raised whether preferential attention to the mouth region of a speaker's face by ASD individuals has resulted in a relative lipreading expertise. We present data on implicit processing of pseudo-dynamic facial emotions and visual speech in adolescents with autism. We compared 25 ASD and 25 TD participants on their ability to recreate the sequences of four dynamic emotional facial expressions (happy, sad, disgust, fear) as well as four spoken words (with, bath, thumb, watch) using six still images taken from a video sequence. Typical adolescents were significantly better at recreating the dynamic properties of emotional expressions than those of facial speech, while the autism group showed the reverse accuracy pattern. For Experiment 2 we obscured the eye region of the stimuli and found no significant difference between the 22 adolescents with ASD and 22 TD controls. Fearful faces achieved the highest accuracy results among the emotions in both groups.

Citing Articles

Conversational adaptation in children and teens with autism: Differences in talkativeness across contexts.

Cola M, Zampella C, Yankowitz L, Plate S, Petrulla V, Tena K Autism Res. 2022; 15(6):1090-1108.

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Atypical Facial Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Exploratory Analysis on the Role of Task Demands.

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Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation EEG Reveals Reduced Neural Sensitivity to Fearful Faces in Children with Autism.

Van der Donck S, Dzhelyova M, Vettori S, Thielen H, Steyaert J, Rossion B J Autism Dev Disord. 2019; 49(11):4658-4673.

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Basic and complex emotion recognition in children with autism: cross-cultural findings.

Fridenson-Hayo S, Berggren S, Lassalle A, Tal S, Pigat D, Bolte S Mol Autism. 2016; 7:52.

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Misinterpretation of facial expressions of emotion in verbal adults with autism spectrum disorder.

Eack S, Mazefsky C, Minshew N Autism. 2014; 19(3):308-15.

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