Emotion Perception or Social Cognitive Complexity: What Drives Face Processing Deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorder?

Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores

Emotion perception is essential for successful social interactions and maintaining long-term relationships with friends and family. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience social communication deficits and have reported difficulties in facial expression recognition. However, emotion recognition depends on more than just processing face expression; context is critically important to correctly infer the emotions of others. Whether context-based emotion processing is impacted in those with Autism remains unclear. Here, we used a recently developed context-based emotion perception task, called Inferential Emotion Tracking (IET), and investigated whether individuals who scored high on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) had deficits in context-based emotion perception. Using 34 videos (including Hollywood movies, home videos, and documentaries), we tested 102 participants as they continuously tracked the affect (valence and arousal) of a blurred-out, invisible character. We found that individual differences in Autism Quotient scores were more strongly correlated with IET task accuracy than they are with traditional face emotion perception tasks. This correlation remained significant even when controlling for potential covarying factors, general intelligence, and performance on traditional face perception tasks. These findings suggest that individuals with ASD may have impaired perception of contextual information, it reveals the importance of developing ecologically relevant emotion perception tasks in order to better assess and treat ASD, and it provides a new direction for further research on context-based emotion perception deficits in ASD.

Impairments in recognition of emotional facial expressions, affective prosody, and multisensory facilitation of response time in high-functioning autism

Introduction

Deficits in emotional perception are common in autistic people, but it remains unclear to which extent these perceptual impairments are linked to specific sensory modalities, specific emotions or multisensory facilitation.

Methods

This study aimed to investigate uni- and bimodal perception of emotional cues as well as multisensory facilitation in autistic (n = 18, mean age: 36.72 years, SD: 11.36) compared to non-autistic (n = 18, mean age: 36.41 years, SD: 12.18) people using auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli.

Results

Lower identification accuracy and longer response time were revealed in high-functioning autistic people. These differences were independent of modality and emotion and showed large effect sizes (Cohen's d 0.8-1.2). Furthermore, multisensory facilitation of response time was observed in non-autistic people that was absent in autistic people, whereas no differences were found in multisensory facilitation of accuracy between the two groups.

Discussion

These findings suggest that processing of auditory and visual components of audiovisual stimuli is carried out more separately in autistic individuals (with equivalent temporal demands required for processing of the respective unimodal cues), but still with similar relative improvement in accuracy, whereas earlier integrative multimodal merging of stimulus properties seems to occur in non-autistic individuals.

Short report: Social processing in non-emotional contexts by children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD)

BACKGROUND

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been reported to show social-processing deficits in forced-choice social judgment or story interpretation tasks. However, these methods may limit examination of social-processing within a set of acceptable answers. In this pilot study, we propose a novel method predicated on the premise that language carries social information and validate this method to measure social perception in ASD.

METHOD

20 children with ASD and 20 typically developing (TD) children matched-pairwise on age (5-12 years), gender, and non-verbal IQ, described pictures of people in everyday situations varying on extent of social engagement. Their social language production was examined in high- and low-social picture conditions.

RESULTS

The TD group produced significantly more social language in high-social than low-social picture conditions, with a large effect size (d = 3.15). The TD group produced significantly more social language than the ASD group under high-social conditions (p< .001, η2p = 0.24), but were not significantly different under low-social conditions (p < .05).

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

The study presents proof-of-concept that expressed language carries social information. The findings indicate that social language may be used to measure social perception and examine differences in ASD, with potential applications for other clinical groups with social-processing challenges.

Implementation of Actors’ Emotional Talent into Social Robots Through Capture of Human Head’s Motion and Basic Expression

The paper presents an initial step towards employing the advantages of educational theatre and implementing them into social robotics in order to enhance the emotional skills of a child and at the same time to augment robots with actors’ emotional talent. Emotional child-robot interaction helps to catch quickly a child’s attention and enhance information perception during learning and verbalization in children with communication disorders. An innovative approach for learning through art by transferring actors’ emotional and social talents to socially assistive robots is presented and the technical and artistic challenges of tracking and translating movements expressing emotions from an actor to a robot are considered. The goal is to augment the robot intervention in order to enhance a child’s learning skills by stimulating attention, improving timing of understanding emotions, establishing emotional contact and teamwork. The paper introduces a novel approach to capture movements and expressions of a human head, to process data from brain and inertial tracking devices and to transfer them into a socially assistive robot.

Impact of visual impairment on balance and visual processing functions in students with special educational needs

INTRODUCTION

Vision is critical for children's development. However, prevalence of visual impairment (VI) is high in students with special educational needs (SEN). Other than VI, SEN students are prone to having functional deficits. Whether visual problems relate to these functional deficits is unclear. This study aimed to assess the impact of vision on visual processing functions and balance in SEN students through a community service.

METHODS

Visual acuity (VA) and contrast sensitivity were measured in a total of 104 (aged 14.3±4.3) SEN students as the visual outcomes, followed by retinoscopy. Visual processing function assessment included facial expression recognition by card matching examiner's facial expression matching, and visual orientation recognition. Dynamic balance, by Timed Up and Go test, and static standing balance (postural sway in double-legged standing with feet-together and tandem-stance for open-eye and closed-eye conditions) were assessed. Static balance was presented in terms of the maximal medial-lateral and antero-posterior sways.

RESULTS

Of the 104 students, 62 (59.6%) were classified as visually impaired according to WHO classification of visual impairment based on presenting distance acuity. Ocular problems (e.g. optic nerve anomaly, uncorrected/ under-corrected refractive errors) and neurological anomalies were the major causes of vision loss. VA was positively associated with visual processing functions (all p ≤ 0.01), as SEN students with better vision tended to perform better in visual orientation and facial expression recognition tasks, as well as dynamic balance function (p = 0.04). For the static balance, postural sway and VA showed a positive relationship under open-eye and tandem stance conditions. However, the relationship between postural sway and VA became negative under closed-eye and tandem stance conditions.

CONCLUSION

This study found a high prevalence of SEN students with visual impairment, in which many of them were undetected. Optometric examination is important to improve their visual function to minimize the effect of vision on functional performance. Vision is critical in visual processing as well as playing an important role in maintaining balance in SEN students.

Distinct Biological Motion Perception in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Meta-Analysis

If neurotypical people rely on specialized perceptual mechanisms when perceiving biological motion, then one would not expect an association between task performance and IQ. However, if those with ASD recruit higher order cognitive skills when solving biological motion tasks, performance may be predicted by IQ. In a meta-analysis that included 19 articles, we found an association between biological motion perception and IQ among observers with ASD but no significant relationship among typical observers. If the task required emotion perception, then there was an even stronger association with IQ in the ASD group.

The State of Automated Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA) in Evaluating Consumer Packaged Beverages

In the late 1970s, analysis of facial expressions to unveil emotional states began to grow and flourish along with new technologies and software advances. Researchers have always been able to document what consumers do, but understanding how consumers feel at a specific moment in time is an important part of the product development puzzle. Because of this, biometric testing methods have been used in numerous studies, as researchers have worked to develop a more comprehensive understanding of consumers. Despite the many articles on automated facial expression analysis (AFEA), literature is limited in regard to food and beverage studies. There are no standards to guide researchers in setting up materials, processing data, or conducting a study, and there are few, if any, compilations of the studies that have been performed to determine whether any methodologies work better than others or what trends have been found. Through a systematic Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) review, 38 articles were found that were relevant to the research goals. The authors identified AFEA study methods that have worked and those that have not been as successful and noted any trends of particular importance. Key takeaways include a listing of commercial AFEA software, experimental methods used within the PRISMA analysis, and a comprehensive explanation of the critical methods and practices of the studies analyzed. Key information was analyzed and compared to determine effects on the study outcomes. Through analyzing the various studies, suggestions and guidance for conducting and analyzing data from AFEA experiments are discussed.

Does culture shape face perception in autism? Cross-cultural evidence of the own-race advantage from the UK and Japan

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with face perception atypicalities, and atypical experience with faces has been proposed as an underlying explanation. Studying the own-race advantage (ORA) for face recognition can reveal the effect of experience on face perception in ASD, although the small number of studies in the area present mixed findings. This study probed the ORA in ASD by comparing two cultural groups simultaneously for the first time. Children with ASD in the UK (N = 16) and Japan (N = 26) were compared with age- and ability-matched typically developing (TD) children in the UK (N = 16) and Japan (N = 26). Participants completed a two-alternative forced-choice task, whereby they had to recognize a just seen face from a foil which was manipulated in one of four ways (IC: identity change; EE: easy eyes; HE: hard eyes; HM: hard mouth). Face stimuli were Asian and Caucasian, and thus the same stimuli were own and other race depending on the cultural group. The ASD groups in the UK and Japan did not show impaired face recognition abilities, or impairments with recognizing faces depending on manipulations to the eye region, and importantly they showed an ORA. There was considerable heterogeneity in the presence of the ORA in ASD and TD and also across cultures. Children in Japan had higher accuracy than children in the UK, and TD children in Japan did not show an ORA. This cross-cultural study challenges the view that atypical experiences with faces lead to a reduced/absent ORA in ASD.

Emotional vs. Neutral Face Exploration and Habituation: An Eye-Tracking Study of Preschoolers With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Diminished orienting to social stimuli, and particularly to faces, is a core feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Impaired face processing has been linked to atypical attention processes that trigger a cascade of pathological development contributing to impaired social communication. The aim of the present study is to explore the processing of emotional and neutral faces using an eye-tracking paradigm (the emotional faces task) with a group of 24 children with ASD aged 6 and under and a group of 22 age-matched typically developing (TD) children. We also measure habituation to faces in both groups based on the presentation of repeated facial expressions. Specifically, the task consists of 32 pairs of faces, a neutral face and an emotional face from the same identity, shown side by side on the screen. We observe differential exploration of emotional faces in preschoolers with ASD compared with TD. Participants with ASD make fewer fixations to emotional faces than their TD peers, and the duration of their first fixation on emotional faces is equivalent to their first fixation on neutral faces. These results suggest that emotional faces may be less interesting for children with ASD. We also observe a habituation process to neutral faces in both children with ASD and TD, who looked less at neutral faces during the last quarter of the task compared with the first quarter. By contrast, TD children show increased interest in emotional faces throughout the task, looking slightly more at emotional faces during the last quarter of the task than during the first quarter. Children with ASD demonstrate neither habituation nor increased interest in the changing emotional expressions over the course of the task, looking at the stimuli for equivalent time throughout the task. A lack of increased interest in emotional faces may suggest a lack of sensitivity to changes in expression in young children with ASD.

Perceptions of self and other: Social judgments and gaze patterns to videos of adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder

Neurotypical adults often form negative first impressions of individuals with autism spectrum disorder and are less interested in engaging with them socially. In contrast, individuals with autism spectrum disorder actively seek out the company of others who share their diagnosis. It is not clear, however, whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder form more positive first impressions of autistic peers when diagnosis is not explicitly shared. We asked adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder to watch brief video clips of adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder and answer questions about their impressions of the individuals in the videos. Questions were related to participants' perceptions of the social skills of the individuals in the video, as well as their own willingness to interact with that person. We also measured gaze patterns to the faces, eyes, and mouths of adolescents in the video stimuli. Both participant groups spent less time gazing at videos of autistic adolescents. Regardless of diagnostic group, all participants provided more negative judgments of autistic than neurotypical adolescents in the videos. These data indicate that, without being explicitly informed of a shared diagnosis, adolescents with autism spectrum disorder form negative first impressions of autistic adolescents that are similar to, or lower than, those formed by neurotypical peers.

Patterns of Nonsocial and Social Cognitive Functioning in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

IMPORTANCE

Many studies have investigated impairments in cognitive domains in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Yet, to date, a comprehensive overview on the patterns of cognitive functioning is lacking.

OBJECTIVE

To provide an overview of nonsocial and social cognitive functioning in various domains in adults with ASD, allowing for comparison of the severity of deficits between different domains.

DATA SOURCES

A literature search performed in an academic medical setting was conducted using PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, and Medline databases with the combination of the following free-text and Medical Subject Headings where applicable: [cogniti* OR neurocogniti* OR neuropsycholog* OR executive function* OR IQ OR intelligence quotient OR social cognition OR emotion perception OR affect perception OR emotion recognition OR attribution OR ToM OR mentalising OR mentalizing OR prosody OR social knowledge OR mind reading OR social cue OR social judgment] AND [autis* OR ASD OR Asperger OR Asperger's OR PDD OR pervasive developmental disorder]. The search was further limited to studies published between 1980 (first inclusion of autism diagnosis in the DSM-III) and July 2018.

STUDY SELECTION

Studies included were published as a primary peer-reviewed research article in English, included individuals with ASD 16 years or older, and assessed at least 1 domain of neurocognitive functioning or social cognition using standard measures.

DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS

Of 9892 articles identified and screened, 75 met the inclusion criteria for the systematic review and meta-analysis.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES

Hedges g effect sizes were computed, and random-effects models were used for all analyses. Moderators of between-study variability in effect sizes were assessed using meta-regressions.

RESULTS

The systematic review and meta-analysis included 75 studies, with a combined sample of 3361 individuals with ASD (mean [SD] age, 32.0 [9.3] years; 75.9% male) and 5344 neurotypical adults (mean [SD] age, 32.3 [9.1] years; 70.1% male). Adults with ASD showed large impairments in theory of mind (g = -1.09; 95% CI, -1.25 to -0.92; number of studies = 39) and emotion perception and processing (g = -0.80; 95% CI, -1.04 to -0.55; n = 18), followed by medium impairments in processing speed (g = -0.61; 95% CI, -0.83 to -0.38; n = 21) and verbal learning and memory (g = -0.55; 95% CI, -0.86 to -0.25; n = 12). The least altered cognitive domains were attention and vigilance (g = -0.30; 95% CI, -0.81 to 0.21; n = 5) and working memory (g = -0.23; 95% CI, -0.47 to 0.01; n = 19). Meta-regressions confirmed robustness of the results.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE

Results of this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that adults with ASD show impairments in social cognitive domains and in specific nonsocial cognitive domains. These findings contribute to the understanding of the patterns of cognitive functioning in adults with ASD and may assist in the identification of targets for cognitive interventions.

Iron and vitamin D levels among autism spectrum disorders children

Aim:

The aim of this study was to investigate iron deficiency anemia and Vitamin D deficiency among autism children and to assess the importance of risk factors (determinants).

Subjects and Methods:

This was a case–control study conducted among children suffering from autism at the Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar. A total of 308 cases and equal number of controls were enrolled. The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Generic was the instrument used for diagnosis of Autism.

Results:

The mean age (±standard deviation, in years) for autistic versus control children was 5.39 ± 1.66 versus 5.62 ± 1.81, respectively. The mean value of serum iron levels in autistic children was severely reduced and significantly lower than in control children (74.13 ± 21.61 μg/dL with a median 74 in autistic children 87.59 ± 23.36 μg/dL in controls) (P = 0.003). Similarly, the study revealed that Vitamin D deficiency was considerably more common among autistic children (18.79 ± 8.35 ng/mL) as compared to healthy children (22.18 ± 9.00 ng/mL) (P = 0.004). Finally, mean values of hemoglobin, ferritin, magnesium; potassium, calcium; phosphorous; glucose, alkaline phosphate, hematocrit, white blood cell, and mean corpuscular volume were all statistically significantly higher in healthy control children as compared to autistic children (P < 0.001). Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that serum iron deficiency, serum calcium levels, serum Vitamin D levels; ferritin, reduced physical activity; child order, body mass index percentiles, and parental consanguinity can all be considered strong predictors and major factors associated with autism spectrum disorders.

Conclusion:

This study suggests that deficiency of iron and Vitamin D as well as anemia were more common in autistic compared to control children.

Dissociation between facial and bodily expressions in emotion recognition: A case study

OBJECTIVE

Existing single-case studies have reported deficit in recognizing basic emotions through facial expression and unaffected performance with body expressions, but not the opposite pattern. The aim of this paper is to present a case study with impaired emotion recognition through body expressions and intact performance with facial expressions.

METHODS

In this single-case study we assessed a 30-year-old patient with autism spectrum disorder, without intellectual disability, and a healthy control group (n = 30) with four tasks of basic and complex emotion recognition through face and body movements, and two non-emotional control tasks. To analyze the dissociation between facial and body expressions, we used Crawford and Garthwaite's operational criteria, and we compared the patient and the control group performance with a modified one-tailed t-test designed specifically for single-case studies.

RESULTS

There were no statistically significant differences between the patient's and the control group's performances on the non-emotional body movement task or the facial perception task. For both kinds of emotions (basic and complex) when the patient's performance was compared to the control group's, statistically significant differences were only observed for the recognition of body expressions. There were no significant differences between the patient's and the control group's correct answers for emotional facial stimuli.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results showed a profile of impaired emotion recognition through body expressions and intact performance with facial expressions. This is the first case study that describes the existence of this kind of dissociation pattern between facial and body expressions of basic and complex emotions.

Priming Facial Gender and Emotional Valence: The Influence of Spatial Frequency on Face Perception in ASD

Adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) performed two priming experiments in which they implicitly processed a prime stimulus, containing high and/or low spatial frequency information, and then explicitly categorized a target face either as male/female (gender task) or as positive/negative (Valence task). Adolescents with ASD made more categorization errors than typically developing adolescents. They also showed an age-dependent improvement in categorization speed and had more difficulties with categorizing facial expressions than gender. However, in neither of the categorization tasks, we found group differences in the processing of coarse versus fine prime information. This contradicted our expectations, and indicated that the perceptual differences between adolescents with and without ASD critically depended on the processing time available for the primes.

Typical pain experience but underestimation of others' pain: Emotion perception in self and others in autism spectrum disorder

Difficulties in emotion perception are commonly observed in autism spectrum disorder. However, it is unclear whether these difficulties can be attributed to a general problem of relating to emotional states, or whether they specifically concern the perception of others' expressions. This study addressed this question in the context of pain, a sensory and emotional state with strong social relevance. We investigated pain evaluation in self and others in 16 male individuals with autism spectrum disorder and 16 age- and gender-matched individuals without autism spectrum disorder. Both groups had at least average intelligence and comparable levels of alexithymia and pain catastrophizing. We assessed pain reactivity by administering suprathreshold electrical pain stimulation at four intensity levels. Pain evaluation in others was investigated using dynamic facial expressions of shoulder patients experiencing pain at the same four intensity levels. Participants with autism spectrum disorder evaluated their own pain as being more intense than the pain of others, showing an underestimation bias for others' pain at all intensity levels. Conversely, in the control group, self- and other evaluations of pain intensity were comparable and positively associated. Results indicate that emotion perception difficulties in autism spectrum disorder concern the evaluation of others' emotional expressions, with no evidence for atypical experience of own emotional states.