The Characteristics of Intelligence Profile and Eye Gaze in Facial Emotion Recognition in Mild and Moderate Preschoolers With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Social impairment in survivors of pediatric brain tumors via reduced social attention and emotion-specific facial expression recognition

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES

Survivors of pediatric brain tumors (SPBT) experience significant social challenges, including fewer friends and greater isolation than peers. Difficulties in face processing and visual social attention have been implicated in these outcomes. This study evaluated facial expression recognition (FER), social attention, and their associations with social impairments in SPBT.

METHODS

SPBT (N = 54; ages 7-16) at least 2 years post treatment completed a measure of FER, while parents completed measures of social impairment. A subset (N = 30) completed a social attention assessment that recorded eye gaze patterns while watching videos depicting pairs of children engaged in joint play. Social Prioritization scores were calculated, with higher scores indicating more face looking. Correlations and regression analyses evaluated associations between variables, while a path analysis modeling tool (PROCESS) evaluated the indirect effects of Social Prioritization on social impairments through emotion-specific FER.

RESULTS

Poorer recognition of angry and sad facial expressions was significantly correlated with greater social impairment. Social Prioritization was positively correlated with angry FER but no other emotions. Social Prioritization had significant indirect effects on social impairments through angry FER.

CONCLUSION

Findings suggest interventions aimed at improving recognition of specific emotions may mitigate social impairments in SPBT. Further, reduced social attention (i.e., diminished face looking) could be a factor in reduced face processing ability, which may result in social impairments. Longitudinal research is needed to elucidate temporal associations between social attention, face processing, and social impairments.

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.

The effects of face masks on emotional appraisal ability of students with autism spectrum disorder

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered the ways in which people are able to communicate effectively. The addition of the face mask as a distracting stimulus interrupts the holistic process that people use to interpret facial expressions. The present study seeks to investigate the impact of face masking and gaze direction on emotion recognition in students with autism. We predicted that students with autism (n = 14), who characteristically experience difficulties when appraising emotions, would struggle to assess the emotions of people wearing face masks. We did not find a significant three-way interaction of emotion, mask, and gaze on classification accuracy. We did, however, find that face masks reduced participants' ability to emotionally appraise sad faces. Further, participants showed better accuracy appraising faces with a direct gaze. Exploring how face masks impact autistic individuals' emotion recognition will benefit special educators as they adapt to teaching during the pandemic, as well as the general population that seeks to improve communication with neurodiverse persons. Future studies should examine emotional appraisal ability and additional emotions as well as different kinds of emotional stimuli.

Effects of other people's facial emotional expression on consumers' perceptions of chocolate chip cookies containing cricket protein

Edible insects are recognized as a potential alternative and sustainable source of high-quality protein for the human diet. Entomophagy is highly related to negative emotions that may cause reluctance to adopt insects as food in Western countries. During human interaction, a person's facial emotional expression (FEE) may influence other people's emotional responses. A person's emotional state may affect his/her food preference and food choice. Understanding how other people's FEE would affect consumers' emotional profiles, liking, and subsequent willingness to try (WTT) and purchase intent (PI) toward insect-containing food products may help increase the acceptance of entomophagy. This study identified emotional responses toward chocolate chip cookies containing cricket protein using valence and arousal scales in order to explore the effects of other people's FEE (positive, negative, and/or sensation seeking) and to find the correlation between consumers' emotional and overall liking (OL) responses for cricket-containing chocolate chip cookies. Predicting PI for such cookies was also performed. For consumers who perceived positive emotion from other people's FEE after watching a short video clip, their emotional feeling was raised on both valence and arousal dimensions, while negative FEE stimulus imparted the opposite effects. The OL scores and emotional intensities after watching the three FEE videos were highly related to consumers' PI. Males compared to females rated the cricket-containing cookies higher on positive emotion intensity, OL, and PI. Among the three FEEs evaluated, the positive emotional stimulus would be beneficial in increasing acceptance, WTT, and PI of insect-containing foods. PRACTICAL APPLICATION: Edible insects are potentially alternative and sustainable sources of high-quality protein for the human diet. Entomophagy is highly related to negative emotions that cause reluctance to adopt insects as food in Western countries. Other people's facial emotional expressions (FEEs) may affect consumer food-evoked emotional profiles, overall liking (OL), and purchase intent (PI). For consumers who perceived positive emotion from other people's FEE, their emotional feeling was raised on both valence and arousal dimensions, and OL scores and emotion intensities were highly related to consumers' PI. Exploiting positive emotional stimuli as demonstrated in this study would be beneficial in increasing acceptance of insect-containing food.

Effects of diagnostic regions on facial emotion recognition: The moving window technique

With regard to facial emotion recognition, previous studies found that specific facial regions were attended more in order to identify certain emotions. We investigated whether a preferential search for emotion-specific diagnostic regions could contribute toward the accurate recognition of facial emotions. Twenty-three neurotypical adults performed an emotion recognition task using six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The participants’ exploration patterns for the faces were measured using the Moving Window Technique (MWT). This technique presented a small window on a blurred face, and the participants explored the face stimuli through a mouse-controlled window in order to recognize the emotions on the face. Our results revealed that when the participants explored the diagnostic regions for each emotion more frequently, the correct recognition of the emotions occurred at a faster rate. To the best of our knowledge, this current study is the first to present evidence that an exploration of emotion-specific diagnostic regions can predict the reaction time of accurate emotion recognition among neurotypical adults. Such findings can be further applied in the evaluation and/or training (regarding emotion recognition functions) of both typically and atypically developing children with emotion recognition difficulties.

NATURAL SEMANTIC INFORMATION-BASED EYE TRACKING USING IMPROVED NEEDLEMAN–WUNSCH AND SUBSMATCH METHODS

This paper proposed an improved natural semantic information-based eye-tracking method combing Needleman–Wunsch and SubsMatch technologies in psychological assessments. The natural semantic information of the self-assessment scale in psychological measurement was combined with the participants’ eye-tracking data, and a time-space similarity method was proposed to calculate the eye-tracking differences between different participants in the questionnaire response and carry out visual pattern recognition to achieve the screening of the target population in psychological measurement. The proposed method was evaluated by screening a sample at high risk of depression. The comparative results showed that the average screening accuracy of the sample under the stimulation of a single topic was 80.13% and increased to 97.37% after a dimensionality reduction. This paper verified the objectivity and effectiveness of the semantic information-based eye-tracking time-space similarity method and proved it to be a promising objective tool to assist psychological measurement.

Eye Tracking Research on the Influence of Spatial Frequency and Inversion Effect on Facial Expression Processing in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Facial expression processing mainly depends on whether the facial features related to expressions can be fully acquired, and whether the appropriate processing strategies can be adopted according to different conditions. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty accurately recognizing facial expressions and responding appropriately, which is regarded as an important cause of their social disorders. This study used eye tracking technology to explore the internal processing mechanism of facial expressions in children with ASD under the influence of spatial frequency and inversion effects for improving their social disorders. The facial expression recognition rate and eye tracking characteristics of children with ASD and typical developing (TD) children on the facial area of interest were recorded and analyzed. The multi-factor mixed experiment results showed that the facial expression recognition rate of children with ASD under various conditions was significantly lower than that of TD children. TD children had more visual attention to the eyes area. However, children with ASD preferred the features of the mouth area, and lacked visual attention and processing of the eyes area. When the face was inverted, TD children had the inversion effect under all three spatial frequency conditions, which was manifested as a significant decrease in expression recognition rate. However, children with ASD only had the inversion effect under the LSF condition, indicating that they mainly used a featural processing method and had the capacity of configural processing under the LSF condition. The eye tracking results showed that when the face was inverted or facial feature information was weakened, both children with ASD and TD children would adjust their facial expression processing strategies accordingly, to increase the visual attention and information processing of their preferred areas. The fixation counts and fixation duration of TD children on the eyes area increased significantly, while the fixation duration of children with ASD on the mouth area increased significantly. The results of this study provided theoretical and practical support for facial expression intervention in children with ASD.

Eye Movement and Pupil Measures: A Review

Our subjective visual experiences involve complex interaction between our eyes, our brain, and the surrounding world. It gives us the sense of sight, color, stereopsis, distance, pattern recognition, motor coordination, and more. The increasing ubiquity of gaze-aware technology brings with it the ability to track gaze and pupil measures with varying degrees of fidelity. With this in mind, a review that considers the various gaze measures becomes increasingly relevant, especially considering our ability to make sense of these signals given different spatio-temporal sampling capacities. In this paper, we selectively review prior work on eye movements and pupil measures. We first describe the main oculomotor events studied in the literature, and their characteristics exploited by different measures. Next, we review various eye movement and pupil measures from prior literature. Finally, we discuss our observations based on applications of these measures, the benefits and practical challenges involving these measures, and our recommendations on future eye-tracking research directions.

Assessment of the Autism Spectrum Disorder Based on Machine Learning and Social Visual Attention: A Systematic Review

The assessment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is based on semi-structured procedures addressed to children and caregivers. Such methods rely on the evaluation of behavioural symptoms rather than on the objective evaluation of psychophysiological underpinnings. Advances in research provided evidence of modern procedures for the early assessment of ASD, involving both machine learning (ML) techniques and biomarkers, as eye movements (EM) towards social stimuli. This systematic review provides a comprehensive discussion of 11 papers regarding the early assessment of ASD based on ML techniques and children's social visual attention (SVA). Evidences suggest ML as a relevant technique for the early assessment of ASD, which might represent a valid biomarker-based procedure to objectively make diagnosis. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

The Gestures in 2-4-Year-Old Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Deficits in gestures act as early signs of impairment in social interaction (SI) and communication in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the pieces of literature on atypical gesture patterns in ASD children are contradictory. This investigation aimed to explore the atypical gesture pattern of ASD children from the dimensions of quantity, communicative function, and integration ability; and its relationship with social ability and adaptive behavior. We used a semi-structured interactive play to evaluate gestures of 33 ASD children (24–48 months old) and 24 typically developing (TD) children (12–36 months old). And we evaluated the social ability, adaptive behavior, and productive language of ASD and TD children by using the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System version II (ABAS-II) and Chinese Communication Development Inventory (CCDI). No matter the total score of CCDI was corrected or not, the relative frequency of total gestures, behavior regulation (BR) gestures, SI gestures, and joint attention (JA) gestures of ASD children were lower than that of TD children, as well as the proportion of JA gestures. However, there was no significant group difference in the proportion of BR and SI gestures. Before adjusting for the total score of CCDI, the relative frequency of gestures without vocalization/verbalization integration and vocalization/verbalization-integrated gestures in ASD children was lower than that in TD children. However, after matching the total score of CCDI, only the relative frequency of gestures without vocalization/verbalization integration was lower. Regardless of the fact that the total score of CCDI was corrected or not, the relative frequency and the proportion of eye-gaze-integrated gestures in ASD children were lower than that in TD children. And the proportion of gestures without eye-gaze integration in ASD children was higher than that in TD children. For ASD children, the social skills score in ABAS-II was positively correlated with the relative frequency of SI gesture and eye-gaze-integrated gestures; the total score of ABAS-II was positively correlated with the relative frequency of total gestures and eye-gaze-integrated gestures. In conclusion, ASD children produce fewer gestures and have deficits in JA gestures. The deficiency of integrating eye gaze and gesture is the core deficit of ASD children’s gesture communication. Relatively, ASD children might be capable of integrating vocalization/verbalization into gestures. SI gestures and the ability to integrate gesture and eye gaze are related to social ability. The quantity of gestures and the ability to integrate gesture with eye gaze are related to adaptive behavior.

Clinical Trial Registration:www.ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier ChiCTR1800019679.

A Developmental Profile of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder in China Using the Griffiths Mental Development Scales

The purpose of this study was to profile the mental development of children aged 18 to 96 months with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using the Chinese version of the Griffiths Mental Development Scales (GMDS), and to explore the relationships between developmental levels and ASD severity, the sex of the child and the age of ASD diagnosis. Children with ASD (n = 398; 337 boys, 61 girls) were recruited and ASD severity evaluated using the Autism Behavior Checklist and the Childhood Autism Rating Scale, while the GMDS was used to evaluate the children's mental development. Study participants were divided into groups according to GMDS general and subscale quotients, ASD severity, sex, and age. The majority of groups divided according to the GMDS quotients exhibited an unbalanced distribution in respect of the six domains of the GMDS and there were significant differences within the six subscale quotients. Autism severity, sex and age had significant effects on the overall level of development of autistic children. The quotients recorded for the children with more severe ASD were significantly lower than those for the children with less severe ASD. A markedly higher proportion of developmental delay was recorded for girls than boys in relation to the performance subscale. The locomotor quotient decreased in line with age at diagnosis, while autism severity and age had significant effects on the general and subscale quotients and sex had a significant effect on performance quotient. Children with ASD exhibit an uneven cognitive development profile, and their overall developmental levels are affected by autism severity, sex and age. Specific cognitive domains differ according to sex in children with ASD. Locomotor skills tend to decrease according to the age at diagnosis for autistic children aged 18 to 84 months. Autism severity and age are also associated with the level of functioning in different cognitive areas. These findings contribute to define the cognitive developmental profiles of children with ASD.

The Griffiths Development Scales-Chinese (GDS-C): A reliable and valid neurodevelopmental assessment tool in children with ASD aged 3-8 years old in Tianjin, China

BACKGROUND

The reliability and validity of the Griffiths Development Scales-Chinese (GDS-C) for autistic children in China are unknown. Thus, it is urgent to verify the instrument's reliability and validity in this population. The aim of the study was to explore whether the GDS-C is reliable and valid for assessing neurodevelopment in autistic children.

METHOD

This study included 296 autistic children and 141 typically developing children from 3 to 8 years of age in China. The reliability of the scale was estimated based on its internal consistency, test-retest reliability and interrater reliability. The validity of the scale was calculated based on the construct validity, discriminate validity and criterion validity. Receiver operating characteristic curves were used to calculate the general quotients (GQs) corresponding to the diagnostic classification within the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) scores.

RESULTS

This study shows sufficient reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.957; test-retest reliability = 0.945 for the whole scale and 0.830-0.919 for the subscales; interrater reliability = 0.925 for the whole scale and 0.796-0.919 for the subscales). The results also provide good support for the validity of the GDS-C. In the discriminant analysis, 85.5% of the children in the autistic sample were correctly classified. The cutoff value for distinguishing autistic children from normal children within the CARS scale corresponds to a GQ of 84.83, and that for distinguishing severely autistic children from mild or moderately autistic children corresponds to a GQ of 66.60.

CONCLUSION

Our findings suggest that the GDS-C may be a valid and reliable tool for assessing the neurodevelopment of autistic children.