The Nature of Facial Emotion Recognition Impairments in Children on the Autism Spectrum

Overview

Journal Child Psychiatry Hum Dev

Specialties Pediatrics
Psychiatry

Date 2019 Feb 14

PMID 30756220

Citations 17

Authors

Nathaniel A Shanok

Nancy Aaron Jones

Nikola N Lucas

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

This study examined socio-emotional skills, utilizing a facial emotion recognition (FER) task featuring unfamiliar and familiar faces, in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to typically developing (TD) children. Results showed that the TD children were more proficient on the FER overall whereas ASD children recognized familiar expressions more precisely than unfamiliar ones. Further, ASD children did not differ from TD children in recognizing happy expressions but ASD children were less skilled with recognizing negative expressions. Findings suggest that ASD children possess more adept FER abilities than previously thought especially for important social others. Ultimately, a task featuring an array of positive and negative familiar and unfamiliar expressions may provide a more comprehensive assessment of socio-emotional abilities in ASD children.

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