Facial Emotion Recognition in Adolescents With Disabilities: The Effects of Type of Disability and Gender

A Study on the Screening of Children at Risk for Developmental Disabilities Using Facial Landmarks Derived From a Mobile-Based Application

OBJECTIVE

Early detection and intervention of developmental disabilities (DDs) are critical to improving the long-term outcomes of afflicted children. In this study, our objective was to utilize facial landmark features from mobile application to distinguish between children with DDs and typically developing (TD) children.

METHODS

The present study recruited 89 children, including 33 diagnosed with DD, and 56 TD children. The aim was to examine the effectiveness of a deep learning classification model using facial video collected from children through mobile-based application. The study participants underwent comprehensive developmental assessments, which included the child completion of the Korean Psychoeducational Profile-Revised and caregiver completing the Korean versions of Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale, Korean version of the Childhood Autism Rating Scale, Social Responsiveness Scale, and Child Behavior Checklist. We extracted facial landmarks from recorded videos using mobile application and performed DDs classification using long short-term memory with stratified 5-fold cross-validation.

RESULTS

The classification model shows an average accuracy of 0.88 (range: 0.78-1.00), an average precision of 0.91 (range: 0.75-1.00), and an average F1-score of 0.80 (range: 0.60-1.00). Upon interpreting prediction results using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), we verified that the most crucial variable was the nodding head angle variable, with a median SHAP score of 2.6. All the top 10 contributing variables exhibited significant differences in distribution between children with DD and TD (p<0.05).

CONCLUSION

The results of this study provide evidence that facial landmarks, utilizing readily available mobile-based video data, can be used to detect DD at an early stage.

Parental mentalising among mothers with intellectual disability or ADHD: Links with experiences of abuse, neglect and psychosocial risk

BACKGROUND

Parental mentalising difficulties are robustly linked to caregiving problems. Mothers with intellectual disability are at risk for caregiving problems, but knowledge on their parental mentalising abilities is lacking. The present study aimed to fill this gap.

METHOD

Thirty mothers with mild intellectual disability, and 61 comparison mothers with ADHD, were assessed for parental mentalising using the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire. Contributions of intellectual disability, maternal exposure to childhood abuse/neglect and psychosocial risk to parental mentalising were examined through hierarchical regression analysis.

RESULTS

Mothers with intellectual disability had a heightened risk for parental mentalising difficulties, in the form of elevated prementalising. Intellectual disability and cumulative childhood abuse/neglect uniquely predicted prementalising among the mothers, whereas cumulative psychosocial risk added to the risk for prementalising specifically among mothers with intellectual disability.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings support contextual models of caregiving, and suggest a need for mentalisation-based support for parents with mild intellectual disability.

Emotional Recognition and Empathy both in Deaf and Blind Adults

Studies addressing the recognition of emotions in blind or deaf participants have been carried out only with children and adolescents. Due to these age limits, such studies do not clarify the long-term effects of vision and hearing disabilities on emotion recognition in adults. We assessed the ability to recognize basic emotions in 15 deaf adults (aged 32.4 ± 8.1 yrs) and in 15 blind adults (48.3 ± 10.5 yrs). Auditory and visual stimuli expressing six basic emotional states were presented to participants (Florida Affect Battery). Participants also performed an empathy test. Deaf participants showed difficulties in emotion recognition tasks compared to the typical hearing participants; however, differences were only statistically reliable for Facial Emotion Discrimination and Naming tasks (specifically, naming expressions of fear). Deaf participants also revealed inferior levels of cognitive empathy. Concerning blind participants, their performance was lower than the controls' only when the task required the evaluation of emotional prosody while ignoring the semantic content of the sentence. Overall, although deaf and blind participants performed reasonably well on tasks requiring recognition of basic emotions, sensory loss may hinder their social perception skills when processing subtle emotions or when the extraction of simultaneous prosodic and semantic information is required.

Effect of auditory status on visual emotion recognition in adolescents

Adolescents with severe to profound hearing loss who wear cochlear implants (CIs) experience significantly more peer problems compared to peers with typical hearing (TH). Differences in peer social dynamics may relate to perception not only of message content, but also message intent based on a speaker's emotion from visual (e.g. facial expressions) and auditory (e.g. prosody) cues. Pediatric CI users may experience greater difficulty with auditory emotion recognition due to an impoverished signal representation provided by the device, but the effect of auditory status on visual emotion recognition yields conflicting results.

OBJECTIVES

The current study examined accuracy and speed of visual emotion recognition in adolescents with CIs and peers with TH.

METHODS

Participants included 58 adolescents (10-18 years) stratified by auditory status: 34 CI users and 24 TH peers. Participants identified the intended emotion (i.e. happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise) of static images of faces displayed on a computer screen.

RESULTS

No significant differences by auditory status emerged for response accuracy, response time to all trials, or response time to correct trials. Type of emotion significantly affected both accuracy and response time.

CONCLUSION

Adolescents with CIs show similar accuracy and response time in recognizing static facial expressions compared to TH peers. Future studies should explore the association between visual emotion recognition and social well-being to determine the relationship between emotion recognition and overall quality of life in adolescents with CIs.