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

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.

The age bias in labeling facial expressions in children: Effects of intensity and expression

Emotion reasoning, including labeling of facial expressions, is an important building block for a child's social development. This study investigated age biases in labeling facial expressions in children and adults, focusing on the influence of intensity and expression on age bias. Children (5 to 14 years old; N = 152) and adults (19 to 25 years old; N = 30) labeled happiness, disgust or sadness at five intensity levels (0%; 25%; 50%; 75%; and 100%) in facial images of children and adults. Sensitivity was computed for each of the expression-intensity combinations, separately for the child and adult faces. Results show that children and adults have an age bias at low levels of intensity (25%). In the case of sadness, children have an age bias for all intensities. Thus, the impact of the age of the face seems largest for expressions which might be most difficult to recognise. Moreover, both adults and children label most expressions best in adult rather than child faces, leading to an other-age bias in children and an own-age bias in adults. Overall, these findings reveal that both children and adults exhibit an age bias in labeling subtle facial expressions of emotions.

Mothers need more information to recognise associated emotions in child facial expressions

Parenting requires mothers to read social cues and understand their children. It is particularly important that they recognise their child's emotions to react appropriately, for example, with compassion to sadness or compersion to happiness. Despite this importance, it is unclear how motherhood affects women's ability to recognise emotions associated with facial expressions in children. Using videos of an emotionally neutral face continually and gradually taking on a facial expression associated with an emotion, we quantified the amount of information needed to match the emotion with the facial expression. Mothers needed more information than non-mothers to match the emotions with the facial expressions. Both mothers and non-mothers performed equally on a control task identifying animals instead of emotions, and both groups needed less information when recognising the emotions associated with facial expressions in adolescents than pre-schoolers. These results indicate that mothers need more information for to correctly recognise typically associated emotions in child facial expressions but not for similar tasks not involving emotions. A possible explanation is that child facial expressions associated with emotions may have a greater emotional impact on mothers than non-mothers leading to task interference but possibly also to increased compassion and compersion.

Developmental differences in the visual processing of emotionally ambiguous neutral faces based on perceived valence

The aim of the present research was to assess age-related differences in how children and adults interpret and visually process emotionally ambiguous neutral faces. Children and adults provided neutral child faces with valence and arousal ratings while eye movements were recorded. Consistent with previous research, children and adults both interpreted the neutral faces as negatively valenced. Both age groups showed fewer fixations to the eye region when they rated the faces as positive. However, adults fixated more on the eye region when they rated the faces as negative whereas children fixated more on the eye region when they rated the faces as neutral. This finding may suggest that children strategically allocate attentional resources to the eye region when processing emotionally ambiguous faces to gather critical affective information. These findings have implications for the utilization of neutral faces as an experimental control condition and serve as the foundation for future research on the development of mechanisms that underlie the interpretation of emotionally ambiguous faces.

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.