A fine-grained analysis of facial expression processing in high-functioning adults with autism

Face perception and social cognitive development in early autism: A prospective longitudinal study from 3 months to 7 years of age

Autism spectrum condition (ASC) is characterized by atypical attention to eyes and faces, but the onset and impact of these atypicalities remain unclear. This prospective longitudinal study examined face perception in infants who develop ASC (N = 22, female = 5, 100% White) compared with typically developing infants (N = 131, female = 65, 55.6% White), tracking social-cognitive and ASC development through age seven. Reduced interest in direct gaze and eyes during infancy correlated with atypical development of adaptive behavior at age four and theory of mind at age seven. Principal component analyses revealed less integrated processing of facial features and eye-gaze information in ASC infants, potentially impacting their childhood social functioning. These findings highlight the intertwined nature of social-cognitive development and ASC.

Herpertz S, Fuchs T. Emotion recognition in autism spectrum condition during the COVID-19 pandemic

LAY ABSTRACT

In the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing face masks became mandatory to prevent the spread of the virus. However, they restrict the ability to recognize emotions to the upper part of the face. Since individuals with autism spectrum condition often tend to look at the lower half of the face, they may be particularly restricted in emotion recognition by people wearing masks, since they are now forced to look at the upper half of the face. The current study compared the recognition of facially expressed emotions between individuals with and without autism spectrum condition. Each photo was shown in three types, once uncovered, once with face mask, and once with sunglasses. Our results revealed a reduction in accuracy of individuals with autism spectrum condition at recognizing emotions in all three stimulus types and exhibited more difficulties distinguishing anger, fear, pride, and embarrassment. During the emotion recognition task, there was no difference in which facial areas the groups looked at. We did not find evidence that the disadvantages of individuals with autism spectrum condition in emotion recognition were due to looking at different areas of the face.

Social Anxiety Symptoms Predict Poorer Facial Emotion Recognition in Autistic Male Adolescents and Young Adults Without Intellectual Disability

Utilizing a novel computerized task, we aimed to examine whether social anxiety symptoms would be related to individual differences in facial emotion recognition (FER) in a sample of autistic male adolescents and young adults without intellectual disability. Results indicated that social anxiety and IQ predicted poorer FER, irrespective of specific emotion type. When probing specific effects within emotion and condition types, social anxiety impacted surprise and disgust FER during a truncated viewing condition and not full viewing condition. Collectively, results suggest that social anxiety in autism may play a larger role in FER than previously thought. Future work should consider the role of social anxiety within autism as a factor that may meaningfully relate to FER assessment and intervention.

A Randomized Trial Utilizing EEG Brain Computer Interface to Improve Facial Emotion Recognition in Autistic Adults

PURPOSE

Many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience challenges with facial emotion recognition (FER), which may exacerbate social difficulties in ASD. Few studies have examined whether FER can be experimentally manipulated and improved for autistic people. This study utilized a randomized controlled trial design to examine acceptability and preliminary clinical impact of a novel mixed reality-based neurofeedback program, FER Assistant, using EEG brain computer interface (BCI)-assisted technology to improve FER for autistic adolescents and adults.

METHODS

Twenty-seven autistic male participants (M age: 21.12 years; M IQ: 105.78; 85% white) were randomized to the active condition to receive FER Assistant (n = 17) or waitlist control (n = 10). FER Assistant participants received ten sessions utilizing BCI-assisted neurofeedback training in FER. All participants, regardless of randomization, completed a computerized FER task at baseline and endpoint.

RESULTS

Results partially indicated that FER Assistant was acceptable to participants. Regression analyses demonstrated that participation in FER Assistant led to group differences in FER at endpoint, compared to a waitlist control. However, analyses examining reliable change in FER indicated no reliable improvement or decline for FER Assistant participants, whereas two waitlist participants demonstrated reliable decline.

CONCLUSION

Given the preliminary nature of this work, results collectively suggest that FER Assistant may be an acceptable intervention. Results also suggest that FER may be a potential mechanism that is amenable to intervention for autistic individuals, although additional trials using larger sample sizes are warranted.

Development and Validation of the Emotion Laden Sentences Toolbox for Emotion Recognition (ELSTER)

Introduction

Emotion recognition plays a crucial role in our social interactions and overall well-being. The present cross-sectional study aimed to develop and validate Emotion Laden Sentences Toolbox for Emotion Recognition (ELSTER), that utilizes emotion-laden sentences as stimuli to assess individuals' ability to perceive and identify emotions conveyed through written language.

Methods

In Phase I, a comprehensive set of emotion-laden sentences in English language were validated by 25 (eight males and 17 females) qualified mental health professionals (MHPs). In Phase II, the sentences that received high interrater agreement in Phase I were selected and then a Hindi version of the same sentences was also developed. The English and Hindi database was then validated among 50 healthy individuals (30 males and 20 females).

Results

The percentage hit rate for all the emotions after exclusion of contempt was 84.3% with a mean kappa for emotional expression being 0.67 among MHPs. The percentage hit rate of all emotion-laden sentences across the database was 81.43% among healthy lay individuals. The mean hit rate percentage for English sentences was similar to Hindi sentences with a mean kappa for emotional expression being 0.63 for the combined English and Hindi sentences.

Conclusion

The ELSTER database would be useful in the Indian context for researching textual emotion recognition. It has been validated among a group of experts as well as healthy lay individuals and was found to have high inter-rater reliability.

Is she still angry? Intact learning but no updating of facial expressions priors in autism

Autistic people exhibit atypical use of prior information when processing simple perceptual stimuli; yet, it remains unclear whether and how these difficulties in using priors extend to complex social stimuli. Here, we compared autistic people without accompanying intellectual disability and nonautistic people in their ability to acquire an "emotional prior" of a facial expression and update this prior to a different facial expression of the same identity. Participants performed a two-interval same/different discrimination task between two facial expressions. To study the acquisition of the prior, we examined how discrimination was modified by the contraction of the perceived facial expressions toward the average of presented stimuli (i.e., regression to the mean). At first, facial expressions surrounded one average emotional prior (mostly sad or angry), and then the average switched (to mostly angry or sad, accordingly). Autistic people exhibited challenges in facial discrimination, and yet acquired the first prior, demonstrating typical regression-to-the-mean effects. However, unlike nonautistic people, autistic people did not update their perception to the second prior, suggesting they are less flexible in updating an acquired prior of emotional expressions. Our findings shed light on the perception of emotional expressions, one of the most pressing challenges in autism.

Let's face it! The role of social anxiety and executive functions in recognizing others' emotions from faces: Evidence from autism and specific learning disorders

Youth with different developmental disorders might experience challenges when dealing with facial emotion recognition (FER). By comparing FER and related emotional and cognitive factors across developmental disorders, researchers can gain a better understanding of challenges and strengths associated with each condition. The aim of the present study was to investigate how social anxiety and executive functioning might underlie FER in youth with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and specific learning disorders (SLD). The study involved 263 children and adolescents between 8 and 16 years old divided into three groups matched for age, sex, and IQ: 60 (52 M) with ASD without intellectual disability, 63 (44 M) with SLD, and 140 (105 M) non-diagnosed. Participants completed an FER test, three executive functions' tasks (inhibition, updating, and set-shifting), and parents filled in a questionnaire reporting their children's social anxiety. Our results suggest that better FER was consistent with higher social anxiety and better updating skills in ASD, while with lower social anxiety in SLD. Clinical practice should focus on coping strategies in autistic youth who could feel anxiety when facing social cues, and on self-efficacy and social worries in SLD. Executive functioning should also be addressed to support social learning in autism.

Recognition of facial expressions in autism: Effects of face masks and alexithymia

It is often assumed that the recognition of facial expressions is impaired in autism. However, recent evidence suggests that reports of expression recognition difficulties in autistic participants may be attributable to co-occurring alexithymia-a trait associated with difficulties interpreting interoceptive and emotional states-not autism per se. Due to problems fixating on the eye-region, autistic individuals may be more reliant on information from the mouth region when judging facial expressions. As such, it may be easier to detect expression recognition deficits attributable to autism, not alexithymia, when participants are forced to base expression judgements on the eye-region alone. To test this possibility, we compared the ability of autistic participants (with and without high levels of alexithymia) and non-autistic controls to categorise facial expressions (a) when the whole face was visible, and (b) when the lower portion of the face was covered with a surgical mask. High-alexithymic autistic participants showed clear evidence of expression recognition difficulties: they correctly categorised fewer expressions than non-autistic controls. In contrast, low-alexithymic autistic participants were unimpaired relative to non-autistic controls. The same pattern of results was seen when judging masked and unmasked expression stimuli. In sum, we find no evidence for an expression recognition deficit attributable to autism, in the absence of high levels of co-occurring alexithymia, either when participants judge whole-face stimuli or just the eye-region. These findings underscore the influence of co-occurring alexithymia on expression recognition in autism.

Own-Age Effects in a Face-Emotion Recognition Intervention for Children With ASD--Evidence From Eye Movements

Background

The own-age effect is the phenomenon in which individuals perceive and recognize faces of their own age better than others in terms of cognitive processing. Previous eye movement studies on children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have reported that children with ASD have an attentional bias toward own-age faces and own-age scenes.

Methods

The present study used own-age faces as the intervention material and examined the application of the own-age effect in the emotional recognition of faces in ASD. The length of the intervention was 12 weeks, and 2 sessions were conducted each week.

Results

The results revealed that the own-age face intervention group gazed at children's faces significantly more often than before the intervention, gazed at children's angry faces significantly longer than before the intervention, and gazed at adults' happy faces significantly longer and more often than before the intervention; the other-age faces intervention group did not differ significantly from the preintervention in gazing at children's and adults' faces after the intervention.

Conclusion

The results suggest that own-age faces as teaching materials can better promote the emotion recognition ability of children with ASD than other-age faces.

How neurotypical listeners recognize emotions expressed through vocal cues by speakers with high-functioning autism

We conducted an investigation to explore how neurotypical (NT) listeners perceive the emotional tone of voice in sentences spoken by individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and NT speakers. The investigation included both male and female speakers from both groups. In Study 1, NT listeners were asked to identify the emotional prosody (anger, fear, happiness, surprise or neutral) conveyed by the speakers. Results revealed that emotional expressions produced by male ASD speakers were generally less accurately recognized compared to male NT speakers. In contrast, emotions expressed by female ASD speakers were more accurately categorized compared to female NT speakers, except when expressing fear. This suggests that female ASD speakers may not express emotional prosody in the same way as their male counterparts. In Study 2, a subset of produced materials was rated for valence, voice modulation, and voice control to supplement Study 1 results: Female ASD speakers sounded less negative when expressing fear compared to female NT speakers. Male ASD speakers were perceived as less positive than NT speakers when expressing happiness. Voice modulation also differed between groups, showing a tendency for ASD speakers to follow different display rules for both positive emotions (happiness and surprise) tested. Finally, male ASD speakers were rated to use voice cues less appropriately compared to NT male speakers, an effect less pronounced for female ASD speakers. Together, the results imply that difficulties in social interactions among individuals with high-functioning ASD could be due to non-prototypical voice use of male ASD speakers and emphasize that female individuals do not show the same effects.

Autistic adults exhibit highly precise representations of others' emotions but a reduced influence of emotion representations on emotion recognition accuracy

To date, studies have not yet established the mechanisms underpinning differences in autistic and non-autistic emotion recognition. The current study first investigated whether autistic and non-autistic adults differed in terms of the precision and/or differentiation of their visual emotion representations and their general matching abilities, and second, explored whether differences therein were related to challenges in accurately recognizing emotional expressions. To fulfil these aims, 45 autistic and 45 non-autistic individuals completed three tasks employing dynamic point light displays of emotional facial expressions. We identified that autistic individuals had more precise visual emotion representations than their non-autistic counterparts, however, this did not confer any benefit for their emotion recognition. Whilst for non-autistic people, non-verbal reasoning and the interaction between precision of emotion representations and matching ability predicted emotion recognition, no variables contributed to autistic emotion recognition. These findings raise the possibility that autistic individuals are less guided by their emotion representations, thus lending support to Bayesian accounts of autism.

Atypical development of social and nonsocial working memory capacity among preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have shown impaired performance in canonical and nonsocial working memory (WM). However, no study has investigated social WM and its early development. Using biological motion stimuli, our study assessed the development of social and nonsocial WM capacity among children with or without ASD across the age span between 4 and 6 (N = 150). While typically developing (TD) children show a rapid development from age 5 to 6, children with ASD showed a delayed development for both social and nonsocial WM capacity, reaching a significant group difference at age 6. Furthermore, we found a negative correlation between social (but not nonsocial) WM capacity and the severity of autistic symptoms among children with ASD. In contrast, there is a positive correlation between both types of WM capacity and intelligence among TD children but not among children with ASD. Our findings thus indicate that individuals with ASD miss the rapid development of WM capacity in early childhood and, particularly, their delayed social WM development might contribute to core symptoms that critically depend on social information processing.

Differences Between Students With Comorbid Intellectual Disability and Autism Spectrum Disorder and Those With Intellectual Disability Alone in the Recognition of and Reaction to Emotions

This study investigates whether students with intellectual disability (ID) alone differ from students with combined individual disability and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in their recognition of emotions. The ability to recognise emotions does not mean that students automatically know how to react to these emotions. Differences in performance on recognition and reaction tasks are examined. Participants were 20 primary 6 students who had ID with ASD and 20 primary 6 students who had ID without ASD from four special schools. The testing and training materials were adapted from a local teaching package. The results showed that both groups exhibited similar performance patterns in recognition tasks. Students with comorbid ASD exhibited inferior performance in tasks requiring reactions to complex emotions.

Experience-dependent reshaping of body gender perception

Protracted exposure to specific stimuli causes biased visual aftereffects at both low- and high-level dimensions of a stimulus. Recently, it has been proposed that alterations of these aftereffects could play a role in body misperceptions. However, since previous studies have mainly addressed manipulations of body size, the relative contribution of low-level retinotopic and/or high-level object-based mechanisms is yet to be understood. In three experiments, we investigated visual aftereffects for body-gender perception, testing for the tuning of visual aftereffects across different characters and orientation. We found that exposure to a distinctively female (or male) body makes androgynous bodies appear as more masculine (or feminine) and that these aftereffects were not specific for the individual characteristics of the adapting body (Exp.1). Furthermore, exposure to only upright bodies (Exp.2) biased the perception of upright, but not of inverted bodies, while exposure to both upright and inverted bodies (Exp.3) biased perception for both. Finally, participants' sensitivity to body aftereffects was lower in individuals with greater communication deficits and deeper internalization of a male gender role. Overall, our data reveals the orientation-, but not identity-tuning of body-gender aftereffects and points to the association between alterations of the malleability of body gender perception and social deficits.

Emotion Facial Processing in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Pilot Study of the Impact of Service Dogs

Processing and recognizing facial expressions are key factors in human social interaction. Past research suggests that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present difficulties to decode facial expressions. Those difficulties are notably attributed to altered strategies in the visual scanning of expressive faces. Numerous studies have demonstrated the multiple benefits of exposure to pet dogs and service dogs on the interaction skills and psychosocial development of children with ASD. However, no study has investigated if those benefits also extend to the processing of facial expressions. The aim of this study was to investigate if having a service dog had an influence on facial expression processing skills of children with ASD. Two groups of 15 children with ASD, with and without a service dog, were compared using a facial expression recognition computer task while their ocular movements were measured using an eye-tracker. While the two groups did not differ in their accuracy and reaction time, results highlighted that children with ASD owning a service dog directed less attention toward areas that were not relevant to facial expression processing. They also displayed a more differentiated scanning of relevant facial features according to the displayed emotion (i.e., they spent more time on the mouth for joy than for anger, and vice versa for the eyes area). Results from the present study suggest that having a service dog and interacting with it on a daily basis may promote the development of specific visual exploration strategies for the processing of human faces.

Sex differences in automatic emotion regulation in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder

Autism may be underdiagnosed in females because their social difficulties are often less noticeable. This study explored sex differences in automatic facial emotion processing in 45 adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (22 female, 23 male), age 10-16 years, performing active target detection task and Go/NoGo tasks where faces with positive and negative emotional expressions served as irrelevant distractors. The combined sample demonstrated more accurate performance on the target detection (response initiation) than the Go/NoGo task (response inhibition), replicating findings previously reported in typical participants. Females exhibited greater difficulty than males with response initiation in the target detection task, especially in the context of angry faces, while males found withholding a response in the Go/NoGo block with happy faces more challenging. Electrophysiological data revealed no sex differences or emotion discrimination effects during the early perceptual processing of faces indexed by the occipitotemporal N170. Autistic males demonstrated increased frontal N2 and parietal P3 amplitudes compared to females, suggesting greater neural resource allocation to automatic emotion regulation processes. The associations between standardized behavioral measures (autism severity, theory of mind skills) and brain responses also varied by sex: more adaptive social functioning was related to the speed of perceptual processing (N170 latency) in females and the extent of deliberate attention allocation (P3 amplitudes) in males. Together, these findings suggest that males and females with autism may rely on different strategies for social functioning and highlight the importance of considering sex differences in autism. LAY SUMMARY: Females with autism may exhibit less noticeable social difficulties than males. This study demonstrates that autistic females are more successful than males at inhibiting behavioral responses in emotional contexts, while males are more likely to initiate a response. At the neural level, social functioning in females is related to the speed of automatic perceptual processing of facial cues, and in males, to the extent of active attention allocation to the stimuli. These findings highlight the importance of considering sex differences in autism diagnosis and treatment selection.

Exploring social emotion processing in autism: evaluating the reading the mind in the eyes test using network analysis

BACKGROUND

Features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) include difficulties in processing and interpreting socioemotional information. The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test (RMET) is a validated measurement for processing socioemotional ability. However, previous RMET studies did not explore patterns of incorrect answers and the emotional valence of the test items. This study used the Taiwanese version of the RMET and the network analysis methods to examine the differences in underlying mechanisms of socioemotional processes between 30 males with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (mean age = 18 years) and 30 healthy control males (mean age = 17 years). For each test item, a picture of a person's eyes and partial face was shown with four words describing the emotional status on picture corners. Participants were instructed to choose one of the four words that best matched the person's thinking or feeling. We further classified the words into three valences of emotional categories to examine socioemotional processes.

RESULTS

Our results showed that ASD males performed poorer on the RMET than the controls. ASD males had higher network density and in-degree scores, especially in negative words, than control males.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings suggest that males with ASD might have deficits in mapping the best emotional concept words to the target item, especially for processing negative emotion.

The structural neural correlates of atypical facial expression recognition in autism spectrum disorder

Previous studies have demonstrated that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are worse at recognizing facial expressions than are typically developing (TD) individuals. The present study investigated the differences in structural neural correlates of emotion recognition between individuals with and without ASD using voxel-based morphometry (VBM). We acquired structural MRI data from 27 high-functioning adults with ASD and 27 age- and sex-matched TD individuals. The ability to recognize facial expressions was measured using a label-matching paradigm featuring six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). The behavioural task did not find deficits of emotion recognition in ASD after controlling for intellectual ability. However, the VBM analysis for the region of interest showed a positive correlation between the averaged percent accuracy across six basic emotions and the grey matter volume of the right inferior frontal gyrus in TD individuals, but not in individuals with ASD. The VBM for the whole brain region under each emotion condition revealed a positive correlation between the percent accuracy for disgusted faces and the grey matter volume of the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in individuals with ASD, but not in TD individuals. The different pattern of correlations suggests that individuals with and without ASD use different processing mechanisms for recognizing others' facial expressions.

Differential beta desynchronisation responses to dynamic emotional facial expressions are attenuated in higher trait anxiety and autism

Daily life demands that we differentiate between a multitude of emotional facial expressions (EFEs). The mirror neuron system (MNS) is becoming increasingly implicated as a neural network involved with understanding emotional body expressions. However, the specificity of the MNS's involvement in emotion recognition has remained largely unexplored. This study investigated whether six basic dynamic EFEs (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) would be differentiated through event-related desynchronisation (ERD) of sensorimotor alpha and beta oscillatory activity, which indexes sensorimotor MNS activity. We found that beta ERD differentiated happy, fearful, and sad dynamic EFEs at the central region of interest, but not at occipital regions. Happy EFEs elicited significantly greater central beta ERD relative to fearful and sad EFEs within 800 - 2,000 ms after EFE onset. These differences were source-localised to the primary somatosensory cortex, which suggests they are likely to reflect differential sensorimotor simulation rather than differential attentional engagement. Furthermore, individuals with higher trait anxiety showed less beta ERD differentiation between happy and sad faces. Similarly, individuals with higher trait autism showed less beta ERD differentiation between happy and fearful faces. These findings suggest that the differential simulation of specific affective states is attenuated in individuals with higher trait anxiety and autism. In summary, the MNS appears to support the skills needed for emotion processing in daily life, which may be influenced by certain individual differences. This provides novel evidence for the notion that simulation-based emotional skills may underlie the emotional difficulties that accompany affective disorders, such as anxiety.

Morphing Task: The Emotion Recognition Process in Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder

Recognizing a person’s identity is a fundamental social ability; facial expressions, in particular, are extremely important in social cognition. Individuals affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) display impairment in the recognition of emotions and, consequently, in recognizing expressions related to emotions, and even their identity. The aim of our study was to compare the performance of participants with ADHD, ASD, and typical development (TD) with regard to both accuracy and speed in the morphing task and to determine whether the use of pictures of digitized cartoon faces could significantly facilitate the process of emotion recognition in ASD patients (particularly for disgust). This study investigated the emotion recognition process through the use of dynamic pictures (human faces vs. cartoon faces) created with the morphing technique in three pediatric populations (7–12 years old): ADHD patients, ASD patients, and an age-matched control sample (TD). The Chi-square test was used to compare response latency and accuracy between the three groups in order to determine if there were statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) in the recognition of basic emotions. The results demonstrated a faster response time in neurotypical children compared to ASD and ADHD children, with ADHD participants performing better than ASD participants on the same task. The overall accuracy parameter between the ADHD and ASD groups did not significantly differ.

Alexithymia and Autistic Traits: Associations With Social and Emotional Challenges Among College Students

Background: Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality construct defined by marked difficulties in identifying and describing feelings and in externally oriented thinking. Given its intrinsic role in social-emotional processing, alexithymia is now recognized as a trans-diagnostic trait in a range of neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism. Research has pinpointed to the co-occurrence of autism with characteristics typical of alexithymic normative samples, such as social-communication difficulties and decreased emotion regulation abilities. Nonetheless, the role of individual facets of alexithymia in predicting challenges in social communication functioning is still understudied. Methods: In total, 275 young adults completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the Autism Spectrum Quotient (short form), the Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire, and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale self-reported questionnaires for assessing alexithymic and autistic traits, social-communication abilities, and emotion regulation difficulties. We used regression models to establish cross-sectional associations between autism, alexithymia, and social-emotional difficulties. Also, we ran a parallel mediation analysis to determine whether the relationship between autistic traits and emotion regulations challenges are mediated by Alexithymia facets. Results: Analysis showed a significant positive association between autistic traits and alexithymic traits and between autistic traits and emotion regulation difficulties while, as expected, autistic traits were negatively correlated with social skills. A significant relationship was found among the participants' levels of alexithymia and their interpersonal skills with two of three alexithymic subscales significantly contributing to the model. Similarly, a significant relationship was found among alexithymia subscales and emotion regulation difficulties with all three alexithymia subscales being statistically significant. Finally, analysis on two mediator models indicated a significant effect of autistic traits on social skills mediated by alexithymic traits as well as a significant indirect effect of autistic traits on emotion regulation difficulties mediated by alexithymic traits. Conclusion: The results of this study provide evidence of the influence of different alexithymic facets on the relationship between autistic traits and social-emotional challenges in young adults. Longitudinal studies may explore further alexithymia and its associations with social-emotional difficulties in autism as well as the potential implications of these findings in intervention and treatment programs.

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

People with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have difficulty with socio-emotional functioning; however, research on facial emotion recognition (FER) remains inconclusive. Individuals with ASD might be using atypical compensatory mechanisms that are exhausted in more complex tasks. This study compared response accuracy and speed on a forced-choice FER task using neutral, happy, sad, disgust, anger, fear and surprise expressions under both timed and non-timed conditions in children with and without ASD (n = 18). The results showed that emotion recognition accuracy was comparable in the two groups in the non-timed condition. However, in the timed condition, children with ASD were less accurate in identifying anger and surprise compared to children without ASD. This suggests that people with ASD have atypical processing of anger and surprise that might become challenged under time pressure. Understanding these atypical processes, and the environmental factors that challenge them, could be beneficial in supporting socio-emotional functioning in people ASD.

Atypical development of emotional face processing networks in autism spectrum disorder from childhood through to adulthood

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MEG connectivity to emotional faces in ASD and typical controls 6–39 years of age was investigated.

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Distinct age-related changes in connectivity were observed in the groups to happy and angry faces.

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Age-related between-group differences in functional connectivity were found in gamma band.

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Emotion-specific age-related between-group differences were seen in beta.

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Findings highlight specific neurodevelopmental trajectories to emotional faces in ASD vs. TD.

Impairments in social functioning are hallmarks of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and atypical functional connectivity may underlie these difficulties. Emotion processing networks typically undergo protracted maturational changes, however, those with ASD show either hyper- or hypo-connectivity with little consensus on the functional connectivity underpinning emotion processing. Magnetoencephalography was used to investigate age-related changes in whole-brain functional connectivity of eight regions of interest during happy and angry face processing in 190 children, adolescents and adults (6–39 years) with and without ASD. Findings revealed age-related changes from child- through to mid-adulthood in functional connectivity in controls and in ASD in theta, as well as age-related between-group differences across emotions, with connectivity decreasing in ASD, but increasing for controls, in gamma. Greater connectivity to angry faces was observed across groups in gamma. Emotion-specific age-related between-group differences in beta were also found, that showed opposite trends with age for happy and angry in ASD. Our results establish altered, frequency-specific developmental trajectories of functional connectivity in ASD, across distributed networks and a broad age range, which may finally help explain the heterogeneity in the literature.

Differential White Matter Maturation from Birth to 8 Years of Age

Comprehensive delineation of white matter (WM) microstructural maturation from birth to childhood is critical for understanding spatiotemporally differential circuit formation. Without a relatively large sample of datasets and coverage of critical developmental periods of both infancy and early childhood, differential maturational charts across WM tracts cannot be delineated. With diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of 118 typically developing (TD) children aged 0–8 years and 31 children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) aged 2–7 years, the microstructure of every major WM tract and tract group was measured with DTI metrics to delineate differential WM maturation. The exponential model of microstructural maturation of all WM was identified. The WM developmental curves were separated into fast, intermediate, and slow phases in 0–8 years with distinctive time period of each phase across the tracts. Shorter periods of the fast and intermediate phases in certain tracts, such as the commissural tracts, indicated faster earlier development. With TD WM maturational curves as the reference, higher residual variance of WM microstructure was found in children with ASD. The presented comprehensive and differential charts of TD WM microstructural maturation of all major tracts and tract groups in 0–8 years provide reference standards for biomarker detection of neuropsychiatric disorders.

Alexithymic But Not Autistic Traits Impair Prosocial Behavior

Social impairments are a core feature of autism-spectrum disorders. However, there is a considerable variability in these impairments. Most autistic individuals show large impairments in social functioning but some autistic individuals show small impairments in social functioning. The variability of these impairments has been attributed to the presence or absence of alexithymia. To address this issue, we capitalized on the fact that alexithymic and autistic traits are broadly distributed in the population. This allowed us to investigate how alexithymic and autistic traits affect social functioning in healthy individuals. Healthy individuals showed impairments on a resource-allocation task that were due to alexithymic but not autistic traits. These findings suggest that alexithymic rather than autistic traits impair prosocial behavior across the autism-spectrum.

Case of Asperger's Syndrome and Lesion of the Right Amygdala: Deficits in Implicit and Explicit Fearful Face Recognition

Introduction: Studies of brain-damaged patients revealed that amygdala lesions cause deficits in the processing and recognition of emotional faces. Patients with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have similar deficits also related to dysfunctions of the limbic system including the amygdala.

Methods: We investigated a male patient who had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. He also presented with a lesion of the right mesial temporal cortex, including the amygdala. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate neuronal processing during a passive viewing task of implicit and explicit emotional faces. Clinical assessment included a facial emotion recognition task.

Results: There was no amygdala activation on both sides during the presentation of masked emotional faces compared to the no-face control condition. Presentation of unmasked happy and angry faces activated the left amygdala compared to the no-face control condition. There was no amygdala activation in response to unmasked fearful faces on both sides. In the facial emotion recognition task, the patient biased positive and neutral expressions as negative.

Conclusions: This case report describes a male patient with right amygdala damage and an ASD. He displayed a non-response of the amygdala to fearful faces and tended to misinterpret fearful expressions. Moreover, a non-reactivity of both amygdalae to emotional facial expressions at an implicit processing level was revealed. It is discussed whether the deficient implicit processing of facial emotional information and abnormalities in fear processing could contribute and aggravate the patient's impairments in social behavior and interaction.

Brain mRNA Expression Associated with Cortical Volume Alterations in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Numerous studies report abnormal cerebral cortex volume (CCV) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, genes related to CCV abnormalities in ASD remain largely unknown. Here, we identify genes associated with CCV alterations in ASD by performing spatial correlations between the gene expression of 6 donated brains and neuroimaging data from 1,404 ASD patients and 1,499 controls. Based on spatial correlations between gene expression and CCV differences from two independent meta-analyses and between gene expression and individual CCV distributions of 404 patients and 496 controls, we identify 417 genes associated with both CCV differences and individual CCV distributions. These genes are enriched for genetic association signals and genes downregulated in the ASD post-mortem brain. The expression patterns of these genes are correlated with brain activation patterns of language-related neural processes frequently impaired in ASD. These findings highlight a model whereby genetic risk impacts gene expression (downregulated), which leads to CCV alterations in ASD.

Face perception predicts affective theory of mind in autism spectrum disorder but not schizophrenia or typical development

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SCZ) have overlapping symptomatology related to difficulties with social cognition. Yet, few studies have directly compared social cognition in ASD, SCZ, and typical development (TD). The current study examined individual differences in face recognition and its relation to affective theory of mind (ToM) in each diagnostic group. Adults with ASD (n = 31), SCZ (n = 43), and TD (n = 47) between the ages of 18 and 48 years-old with full scale IQ above 80 participated in this study. The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) measured affective ToM, and the Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT) measured face perception. Adults with ASD and SCZ did not differ in their affective ToM abilities, and both groups showed affective ToM difficulties compared with TD. However, better face recognition ability uniquely predicted better affective ToM ability in ASD. Results suggest that affective ToM difficulties may relate to face processing in ASD but not SCZ. By clarifying the complex nature of individual differences in affective ToM and face recognition difficulties in these disorders, the present study suggests there may be divergent mechanisms underlying pathways to social dysfunction in ASD compared with SCZ. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Facial Emotions Are Accurately Encoded in the Neural Signal of Those With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Deep Learning Approach

BACKGROUND

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit frequent behavioral deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER). It remains unknown whether these deficits arise because facial emotion information is not encoded in their neural signal or because it is encodes but fails to translate to FER behavior (deployment). This distinction has functional implications, including constraining when differences in social information processing occur in ASD, and guiding interventions (i.e., developing prosthetic FER vs. reinforcing existing skills).

METHODS

We utilized a discriminative and contemporary machine learning approach-deep convolutional neural networks-to classify facial emotions viewed by individuals with and without ASD (N = 88) from concurrently recorded electroencephalography signals.

RESULTS

The convolutional neural network classified facial emotions with high accuracy for both ASD and non-ASD groups, even though individuals with ASD performed more poorly on the concurrent FER task. In fact, convolutional neural network accuracy was greater in the ASD group and was not related to behavioral performance. This pattern of results replicated across three independent participant samples. Moreover, feature importance analyses suggested that a late temporal window of neural activity (1000-1500 ms) may be uniquely important in facial emotion classification for individuals with ASD.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results reveal for the first time that facial emotion information is encoded in the neural signal of individuals with (and without) ASD. Thus, observed difficulties in behavioral FER associated with ASD likely arise from difficulties in decoding or deployment of facial emotion information within the neural signal. Interventions should focus on capitalizing on this intact encoding rather than promoting compensation or FER prostheses.

The Interpretation of E-Motions in Faces and Bodies Derived from Static Artworks by Individuals with High Functioning Autistic Spectrum

E-motions are defined as those affective states the expressions of which-conveyed either by static faces or body posture-embody a dynamic component and, consequently, convey a higher sense of dynamicity than other emotional expressions. An experiment is presented, aimed at testing whether e-motions are perceived as such also by individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), which have been associated with impairments in emotion recognition and in motion perception. To this aim we replicate with ASD individuals a study, originally conducted with typically developed individuals (TDs), in which we showed to both ASD and TD participants 14 bodiless heads and 14 headless bodies taken from eleven static artworks and four drawings. The Experiment was divided into two sessions. In Session 1 participants were asked to freely associate each stimulus to an emotion or an affective state (Task 1, option A); if they were unable to find a specific emotion, the experimenter showed them a list of eight possible emotions (words) and asked them to choose one from such list, that best described the affective state portrayed in the image (Task 1, option B). After their choice, they were asked to rate the intensity of the perceived emotion on a seven point Likert scale (Task 2). In Session 2 participants were requested to evaluate the degree of dynamicity conveyed by each stimulus on a 7 point Likert scale. Results showed that ASDs and TDs shared a similar range of verbal expressions defining emotions; however, ASDs (i) showed an impairment in the ability to spontaneously assign an emotion to a headless body, and (ii) they more frequently used terms denoting negative emotions (for both faces and bodies) as compared to neutral emotions, which in turn were more frequently used by TDs. No difference emerged between the two groups for positive emotions, with happiness being the emotion better recognized in both faces and in bodies. Although overall there are no significant differences between the two groups with respect to the emotions assigned to the images and the degree of perceived dynamicity, the interaction Artwork x Group showed that for some images ASDs assigned a different value than TDs to perceived dynamicity. Moreover, two images were interpreted by ASDs as conveying completely different emotions than those perceived by TDs. Results are discussed in light of the ability of ASDs to resolve ambiguity, and of possible different cognitive styles characterizing the aesthetical/emotional experience.

Social Inferences in Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum and Autism: Semantic Analysis and Topic Modeling

Impoverished capacity for social inference is one of several symptoms that are common to both agenesis of the corpus callosum (AgCC) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This research compared the ability of 14 adults with AgCC, 13 high-functioning adults with ASD and 14 neurotypical controls to accurately attribute social meaning to the interactions of animated triangles. Descriptions of the animations were analyzed in three ways: subjective ratings, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, and topic modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation). Although subjective ratings indicated that all groups made similar inferences from the animations, the index of perplexity (atypicality of topic) generated from topic modeling revealed that inferences from individuals with AgCC or ASD displayed significantly less social imagination than those of controls.

Associations Between Emotional Competence and Prosocial Behaviors With Peers Among Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at risk for disrupted peer interactions. This study contributes to our understanding of how multiple foundational elements of emotional competence are related to children's prosocial behaviors with peers. Children with ASD demonstrated significantly lower non-stereotypical affective perspective taking, had lower ratings of emotion regulation, and showed differences from their typical peers in the use of discrete coping strategies during peer interactions. Children's emotion regulation and use of discrete coping strategies in the context of peers were associated with their prosocial behaviors one year later. The findings add to our understanding of how emotional development contributes to individual differences in the social-emotional behaviors of children with ASD. Implications for intervention are discussed.

When Alterations in Social Cognition Meet Subjective Complaints in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evaluation With the "ClaCoS" Battery

Background: Deficit in social communication is a core feature in Autism Spectrum Disorder but remains poorly assessed in classical clinical practice, especially in adult populations. This gap between needs and practice is partly due to a lack of standardized evaluation tools. The multicentric Research group in psychiatry GDR3557 (Institut de Psychiatrie) developed a new battery for social cognitive evaluation named "ClaCoS," which allows testing the main components of social cognition: Emotion Recognition, Theory of Mind, Attributional Style, and Social Perception and Knowledge. It further provides an assessment of subjective complaints in social cognition. Methods: We compared the social cognition abilities of 45 adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder without intellectual disability and 45 neurotypically developed volunteers using the "ClaCoS" battery, in order to determine its relevance in the evaluation of social cognition impairments in autism. A correlational approach allowed us to test the links between subjective complaints and objectively measured impairments for the different components of social cognition. Results: As expected, the Autism Spectrum Disorder group showed deficits in all four components of social cognition. Moreover, they reported greater subjective complaints than controls regarding their social abilities, correlated to the neuropsychological assessments. Conclusion: The "ClaCoS" battery is an interesting tool allowing to assess social impairments in autism and to specify the altered components, for a better adjustment of tailored social cognition training programs. Our results further suggest that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder have a good social cognitive insight, i.e., awareness into social cognitive functioning, and may thus benefit from social cognitive training tools.

Impaired Recognition of Static and Dynamic Facial Emotions in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Stimuli of Varying Intensities, Different Genders, and Age Ranges Faces

A multitude of research on facial emotion recognition (FER) in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been published since several years. However, these studies have mainly used static high intensity stimuli, including adult and/or children facial emotions. This current study investigated FER in children with ASD using an innovative task, composed of a combination of static (114 pictures) and dynamic (36 videos) subtests, including children, adolescent, and adult male and female faces, with high, medium, and low intensity of basic facial emotions, and neutral expression. The ASD group consisted of 45 Tunisian verbal children, and the control group consisted of 117 tunisian typically developing children. Both groups were aged 7-12 years. After adjusting for sex, age, mental age, and school grade, the ASD group scored lower than controls on all tests except for the recognition of happiness and fear in the static subtest, and the recognition of happiness, fear, and sadness in the dynamic subtest (p ≥ 0.05). In the ASD group, the total score of both the static and the dynamic subtest were positively correlated with the school grade (p < 0.001), but not with age, or mental age. Children with ASD performed better in recognizing facial emotions in children than in adults and adolescents on videos and photos (p < 0.001). Impairments in FER would have negative impact on the child's social development. Thus, the creation of new intervention instruments aiming to improve emotion recognition strategies at an early stage to individuals with ASD seems fundamental.

The Association Between Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test Performance and Intelligence Quotient in Children and Adolescents With Asperger Syndrome

Background: There has been an extensive debate about a potential association between intelligence and social cognition. In this study, we aimed to assess the association between social cognition as measured with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (RMET) and intelligence as measured with the fourth edition of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV) in children and adolescents diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (AS). Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study among 84 children diagnosed with AS aged 6-16 years (mean = 11.64; standard deviation = 2.75; 92.9% males). We analyzed the association between RMET performance and WISC-IV total score as well as the association between RMET performance and each of the four WISC-IV indexes (processing speed index, PSI; working memory index, WMI; perceptual reasoning index, PRI, and verbal comprehension index, VCI). Results: We found a positive correlation between RMET performance and full-scale intelligence quotient (r = 0.340; p < 0.01), VCI (r = 0.310; p < 0.01), PRI (r = 0.401; p < 0.01), and WMI (r = 0.292; p < 0.01). In the linear regression model, age was a significant predictor of RMET score (β = 0.409; p < 0.001) as was PRI (β = 0.309; p = 0.019). Conclusion: Our results suggest that intelligence quotient positively influences RMET performance, indicating that intelligence increases social cognition in individuals diagnosed with AS. However, weak-to-moderate size effects were found. This study contributes to understanding the mechanisms underlying the disturbance of social cognition in children and adolescents diagnosed with AS.

Measuring change in facial emotion recognition in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review

LAY ABSTRACT

Children and adults with autism spectrum disorder show difficulty recognizing facial emotions in others, which makes social interaction challenging. While there are many treatments developed to improve facial emotion recognition, there is no agreement on the best way to measure such abilities in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. The purpose of this review is to examine studies that were published between January 1998 and November 2019 and have measured change in facial emotion recognition to evaluate the effectiveness of different treatments. Our search yielded 65 studies, and within these studies, 36 different measures were used to evaluate facial emotion recognition in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Only six of these measures, however, were used in different studies and by different investigators. In this review, we summarize the different measures and outcomes of the studies, in order to identify promising assessment tools and inform future research.

"Reading the Mind in the Eyes" in Autistic Adults is Modulated by Valence and Difficulty: An InFoR Study

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are heterogeneous and complex neurodevelopmental conditions that urgently need reliable and sensitive measures to inform diagnosis properly. The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (or Eyes Test from now on) is widely used for this purpose. A recent study showed that subcategories of items of the children version of the Eyes Test could be especially discriminative to distinguish ASD and control children. Here, we analyzed the performance on the Eyes Test of 30 high functioning (IQ > 70) adults with ASD and 29 controls from the InFoR cohort multicentric study, using a Generalized Linear Mixed Model. We found that valence and difficulty modulate the performance on the Eyes Test, with easy and positive items being the most discriminative to distinguish ASD and controls. In particular, we suggest this result might be actionable to discriminate ASD patients from controls in subgroups where their overall scores show less difference with controls. We propose for future research the computation of two additional indexes when using the Eyes Test: the first focusing on the easy and positive items (applying a threshold of 70% of correct responses for these items, above which people are at very low risk of having ASD) and the second focusing on the performance gain from difficult to easy items (with a progression of less than 15% showing high risk of having ASD). Our findings open the possibility for a major change in how the Eyes Test is used to inform diagnosis in ASD.

Lay Summary

The Eyes Test is used worldwide to inform autism spectrum disorders (ASD) diagnosis. We show here that ASD and neurotypical adults show the most difference in performance on subgroups of items: ASD adults do not improve as expected when comparing easy and difficult items, and they do not show an improvement for items displaying a positive feeling. We advise clinicians to focus on these comparisons to increase the property of the test to distinguish people with ASD from neurotypical adults.

Evidence of an Own-Age Bias in Facial Emotion Recognition for Adolescents With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

A common interpretation of the face-processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that they arise from a failure to develop normative levels of perceptual expertise. One indicator of perceptual expertise for faces is the own-age bias, operationalized as a processing advantage for faces of one's own age, presumably due to more frequent contact and experience. This effect is especially evident in domains of face recognition memory but less commonly investigated in social-emotional expertise (e.g., facial emotion recognition; FER), where individuals with ASD have shown consistent deficits. In the present study, we investigated whether a FER task would elicit an own-age bias for individuals with and without ASD and explored how the magnitude of an own-age bias may differ as a function of ASD status and symptoms. Ninety-two adolescents (63 male) between the ages of 11 and 14 years completed the child- and adult-face subtests of a standardized FER task. Overall FER accuracy was found to differ by ASD severity, reflecting poorer performance for those with increased symptoms. Results also indicated that an own-age bias was evident, reflecting greater FER performance for child compared to adult faces, for all adolescents regardless of ASD status or symptoms. However, the strength of the observed own-age bias did not differ by ASD status or severity. Findings suggest that face processing abilities of adolescents with ASD may be influenced by experience with specific categories of stimuli, similar to their typically developing peers.

Childhood maltreatment moderates the relationship between emotion recognition and maternal sensitive behaviors

BACKGROUND

Sensitivity is defined as parents ability to perceive, react and respond to children signals. Having a history of childhood maltreatment changes the way adults perceive visual emotions. These perceptual characteristics could have important consequences on how these parents respond to their children.

OBJECTIVE

The current study examines how a history of childhood maltreatment moderates the relationship between maternal emotion recognition in child faces and sensitive behaviors toward their child during free-play and a structured task.

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING

Participants included 58 mothers and their children aged between 2 and 5 years.

METHODS

Mothers were exposed to a set of photographs of child faces showing morphed images of the six basic emotional expressions. Mother-child interactions were then coded for sensitive behaviors. Mothers' history of childhood maltreatment was assessed using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire.

RESULTS

Maltreatment severity was related to poorer abilities in emotion recognition. However, the association between emotion recognition and sensitive behavior was moderate by history of childhood maltreatment. For mothers exposed to a severe form of childhood maltreatment, a better emotion recognition was related to less sensitive behaviors toward the child, both during free-play and the structured task.

CONCLUSION

This relationship is unique to these mothers and is inconsistent with Ainsworth's definition of sensitivity. These results have important implications as they suggest mothers with a history of severe maltreatment would need tailored interventions which take into account their particular reactions to children's emotions.

Testing the magnocellular-pathway advantage in facial expressions processing for consistency over time

The ability to identify facial expressions rapidly and accurately is central to human evolution. Previous studies have demonstrated that this ability relies to a large extent on the magnocellular, rather than parvocellular, visual pathway, which is biased toward processing low spatial frequencies. Despite the generally consistent finding, no study to date has investigated the reliability of this effect over time. In the present study, 40 participants completed a facial emotion identification task (fearful, happy, or neutral faces) using facial images presented at three different spatial frequencies (low, high, or broad spatial frequency), at two time points separated by one year. Bayesian statistics revealed an advantage for the magnocellular pathway in processing facial expressions; however, no effect for time was found. Furthermore, participants' RT patterns of results were highly stable over time. Our replication, together with the consistency of our measurements within subjects, underscores the robustness of this effect. This capacity, therefore, may be considered in a trait-like manner, suggesting that individuals may possess various ability levels for processing facial expressions that can be captured in behavioral measurements.

The Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Recognition of Ambiguous Emotional Facial Expressions in Individuals With ADHD

Objective: The present study sought to investigate whether young adults with ADHD have more difficulty recognizing emotional facial expressions compared with young adults without ADHD, and whether such a difference worsens following sleep deprivation. Method: Thirty-one young men (M = 25.6) with (n = 15) or without (n = 16) a diagnosis of ADHD were included in this study. The participants were instructed to sleep 7 hr or more each night for one week, and their sleep quality was monitored via actigraph. Subsequently, the participants were kept awake in a controlled environment for 30 hr. The participants completed a visual emotional morph task twice-at the beginning and at the end of this period. The task included presentation of interpolated face stimuli ranging from neutral facial expressions to fully emotional facial expressions of anger, sadness, or happiness, allowing for assessment of the intensity threshold for recognizing these facial emotional expressions. Results: Actigraphy data demonstrated that while the nightly sleep duration of the participants with ADHD was similar to that of participants without ADHD, their sleep efficiency was poorer. At the onset of the experiment, there were no differences in recognition thresholds between the participants with ADHD and those without ADHD. Following sleep deprivation, however, the ADHD group required clearer facial expressions to recognize the presence of angry, sad, and, to a lesser extent, happy faces. Conclusion: Among young adults with ADHD, sleep deprivation may hinder the processing of emotional facial stimuli.

Differences in the Late Positive Potential and P300 to Emotional Faces in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Despite evidence suggesting differences in early event-related potential (ERP) responses to social emotional stimuli, little is known about later stage ERP contributions to social emotional processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Adults with and without ASD completed a facial emotion recognition task involving stimuli that varied by emotional intensity while electroencephalograms were recorded. Principal components analysis was used to examine P300 and late positive potential (LPP) modulation by emotional intensity. Results indicated that greater ASD symptomatology evinced heightened P300 to high relative to low intensity faces, then heightened LPP to low relative to high intensity faces. Findings suggest that adults with greater ASD symptomatology may demonstrate a lag in engagement in elaborative processing of low intensity faces.

Expression Recognition Difficulty Is Associated with Social But Not Attention-to-Detail Autistic Traits and Reflects Both Alexithymia and Perceptual Difficulty

Autistic people often show difficulty with facial expression recognition. However, the degree of difficulty varies widely, which might reflect varying symptom profiles. We examined three domains of autistic traits in the typical population and found that more autistic-like social skills were associated with greater difficulty labelling expressions, and more autistic-like communication was associated with greater difficulty labelling and perceptually discriminating between expressions. There were no associations with autistic-like attention to detail. We also found that labelling, but not perceptual, difficulty was mediated by alexithymia. We found no evidence that labelling or perceptual difficulty was mediated by weakened adaptive coding. Results suggest expression recognition varies between the sub-clinical expressions of autistic symptom domains and reflects both co-occurring alexithymia and perceptual difficulty.

Attention Modification to Attenuate Facial Emotion Recognition Deficits in Children with Autism: A Pilot Study

Diminished attending to faces may contribute to the impairments in emotion recognition and expression in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study evaluated the acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of an attention modification intervention designed to attenuate deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER). During the 10-session experimental treatment, children (n = 8) with ASD watched dynamic videos of people expressing different emotions with the facial features highlighted to guide children's attention. Children and their parents generally rated the treatment as acceptable and helpful. Although FER improvement was not apparent on task-based measures, parents reported slight improvements and decreased socioemotional problems following treatment. Results suggest that further research on visual attention retraining for ASD, within an experimental therapeutic program, may be promising.

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

We objectively quantified the neural sensitivity of school-aged boys with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to detect briefly presented fearful expressions by combining fast periodic visual stimulation with frequency-tagging electroencephalography. Images of neutral faces were presented at 6 Hz, periodically interleaved with fearful expressions at 1.2 Hz oddball rate. While both groups equally display the face inversion effect and mainly rely on information from the mouth to detect fearful expressions, boys with ASD generally show reduced neural responses to rapid changes in expression. At an individual level, fear discrimination responses predict clinical status with an 83% accuracy. This implicit and straightforward approach identifies subtle deficits that remain concealed in behavioral tasks, thereby opening new perspectives for clinical diagnosis.

Impaired Recognition of Basic Emotions from Facial Expressions in Young People with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Assessing the Importance of Expression Intensity

It has been proposed that impairments in emotion recognition in ASD are greater for more subtle expressions of emotion. We measured recognition of 6 basic facial expressions at 8 intensity levels in young people (6-16 years) with ASD (N = 63) and controls (N = 64) via an Internet platform. Participants with ASD were less accurate than controls at labelling expressions across intensity levels, although differences at very low levels were not detected due to floor effects. Recognition accuracy did not correlate with parent-reported social functioning in either group. These findings provide further evidence for an impairment in recognition of basic emotion in ASD and do not support the idea that this impairment is limited solely to low intensity expressions.

Face perception in autism spectrum disorder: Modulation of holistic processing by facial emotion

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD; autistic individuals) may exhibit atypical face perception because they fail to process faces holistically. In the context of this hypothesis, it is critical to determine whether autistic individuals exhibit diminished susceptibility to the composite face illusion, widely regarded as a key marker of holistic face processing. To date, however, previous studies have yielded inconsistent findings. In light of recent evidence suggesting that facial emotion cues increase the strength of the composite face illusion in typical individuals, the present study sought to determine whether the presence of facial emotion also modulates the strength of the composite face illusion in autistic individuals, many of whom experience difficulties recognizing facial expressions. We therefore measured composite face effects in a sample of autistic individuals (N = 20) and matched typical controls (N = 29) using an incidental emotion procedure in which distractor regions varied systematically in their emotion strength. As expected, the presence of facial emotion in the distractor regions of composite face arrangements increased the strength of the illusory distortion induced. The extent of the modulation by facial emotion was similar in the two groups. The composite effects seen in the ASD group were qualitatively and quantitatively similar to those seen in the typical group, suggestive of intact holistic processing in this population.

Visual scanning during emotion recognition in long-term recovered anorexia nervosa: An eye-tracking study

OBJECTIVE

To examine Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) and visual scanning behavior (eye-tracking) during FER in women long-term recovered from teenage-onset anorexia nervosa (recAN) with and without autism spectrum disorder (±ASD) and age-matched comparison women (COMP), using a sensitive design with facial emotion expressions at varying intensities in order to approximate real social contexts.

METHOD

Fifty-seven 38-47-year-old women (26 recAN of whom six with ASD, 31 COMP) participated in the study. They completed a non-verbal FER task, consisting of matching basic emotions at different levels of expression intensity with full emotional expressions. Accuracy, response time and visual scanning behavior were measured.

RESULTS

There were no differences between recAN-ASD and COMP in FER accuracy and visual scanning behavior during FER, including eye viewing and hyperscanning. In an exploratory analysis, recAN+ASD were more accurate than recAN-ASD in identifying expressions at low intensity, but not at medium or high expression intensity. Accuracy was not associated with the extent of attention to the eye region.

DISCUSSION

Our data indicate that women long-term recovered from adolescent-onset AN do not have deficits in basic FER ability and visual scanning behavior during FER. However, the presence of comorbid ASD might affect face processing in recovered AN. Future studies investigating basic FER in acute and recovered AN and other conditions need to ensure that the stimuli used are sensitive enough to detect potential deficits.

The visual cues that drive the self-assessment of body size: Dissociation between fixation patterns and the key areas of the body for accurate judgement

A modified version of the bubbles masking paradigm was used in three experiments to determine the key areas of the body that are used in self-estimates of body size. In this paradigm, parts of the stimuli are revealed by several randomly allocated Gaussian "windows" forcing judgements to be made based on this partial information. Over multiple trials, all potential cues are sampled, and the effectiveness of each window at predicting the judgement is determined. The modified bubbles strategy emphasises the distinction between central versus edge cues and localises the visual features used in judging one's own body size. In addition, eye-movements were measured in conjunction with the bubbles paradigm and the results mapped onto a common reference space. This shows that although observers fixate centrally on the torso, they are actually directing their visual attention to the edges of the torso to gauge body width as an index of body size. The central fixations are simply the most efficient way of positioning the eye to make this estimation. Inaccurate observers are less precise in their central fixations and do not evenly allocate their attention to both sides of the torso's edge, illustrating the importance of efficiently sampling the key information.