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Reduced Recognition of Dynamic Facial Emotional Expressions and Emotion-Specific Response Bias in Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Abstract

Emotion labelling was evaluated in two matched samples of 6–14-year old children with and without an autism spectrum disorder (ASD; N = 45 and N = 50, resp.), using six dynamic facial expressions. The Emotion Recognition Task proved to be valuable demonstrating subtle emotion recognition difficulties in ASD, as we showed a general poorer emotion recognition performance, in addition to some emotion-specific impairments in the ASD group. Participants’ preference for selecting a certain emotion label, irrespective of the stimulus presented, played an important role in our results: response bias-corrected data still showed an overall decreased emotion recognition performance in ASD, but no emotion-specific impairments anymore. Moreover, ASD traits and empathy were correlated with emotion recognition performance.

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Notes

  1. ADOS severity scores are calibrated scores ranging between one and ten, with scores of four and five considered representative of an ASD classification (Gotham et al. 2009).

  2. An example: Participant X and Y have both labelled all of the high intense angry trials correctly (performance = 100 %). However, participant X always responded ‘anger’, independent of the stimulus presented (response bias = 100 %), and participant Y only responded ‘anger’ when an angry face was presented (response bias = 16.67 %). Consequently, the corrected performance of participant X (100/100 = 1.00) will be lower than the corrected performance of participant Y (100/16.67 = 6.00).

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Acknowledgments

We want to thank all participating children and their parents. Special thanks go to the participating schools, Ten Bunderen (Moorslede), De Puzzel (Kleine-Brogel) and De Schommel (Lommel). Thanks to Dr. Ervin Poljac for sharing his expertise with the Emotion Recognition Task. We thank Birgitt Haesen and the following master students for their assistance with data collection: Nele Berghmans, Stéphanie Deckmyn, Sanne Drees, Tine Herreman, Ellen Janssen, Loes Steegmans, Lotte van Esch, Alysée Van Laeken, and Leen Vercammen. This research was funded by the Methusalem program by the Flemish Government (METH 08/02) awarded to J.W., by a grant from the Research Council of the KU Leuven (IDO/080/013) awarded to J.S., J.W. and I.N., and by a grant from the Marguerite Marie Delacroix Support Fund (GV/B-141) awarded to K.E.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, KU Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, Box 3711, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Kris Evers & Johan Wagemans

  2. Department of Child Psychiatry, UPC-KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Kris Evers & Jean Steyaert

  3. Leuven Autism Research (LAuRes), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Kris Evers, Jean Steyaert, Ilse Noens & Johan Wagemans

  4. Department of Clinical Genetics, University Hospital Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Jean Steyaert

  5. Parenting and Special Education Research Unit, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Ilse Noens

  6. Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

    Ilse Noens

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  1. Kris Evers
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Correspondence to Kris Evers.

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Evers, K., Steyaert, J., Noens, I. et al. Reduced Recognition of Dynamic Facial Emotional Expressions and Emotion-Specific Response Bias in Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 45, 1774–1784 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2337-x

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