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Specific Patterns of Emotion Recognition from Faces in Children with ASD: Results of a Cross-Modal Matching Paradigm

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Abstract

Children with ASD show emotion recognition difficulties, as part of their social communication deficits. We examined facial emotion recognition (FER) in intellectually disabled children with ASD and in younger typically developing (TD) controls, matched on mental age. Our emotion-matching paradigm employed three different modalities: facial, vocal and verbal. Results confirmed overall FER deficits in ASD. Compared to the TD group, children with ASD had the poorest performance in recognizing surprise and anger in comparison to happiness and sadness, and struggled with face–face matching, compared to voice-face and word-face combinations. Performance in the voice-face cross-modal recognition task was related to adaptive communication. These findings highlight the specific face processing deficit, and the relative merit of cross-modal integration in children with ASD.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our participants and their families and teachers, and to Ye’ela Goldberg, Libby Stein, and Shahar Tal, for assisting with data collection and analysis.

Funding

Ofer Golan received funding for this study by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Technology, and Space grant (# 10842). Ilanit Gordon was funded by the Israeli Science Foundation grants (# 2096/15 #1726/15).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Ofer Golan & Ilanit Gordon

  2. School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Keren Fichman & Giora Keinan

Authors
  1. Ofer Golan
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  2. Ilanit Gordon
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  3. Keren Fichman
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  4. Giora Keinan
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Contributions

All authors made substantial contributions to the study. OG. GK, and KP designed the study, KP collected the data, OG and IG analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ofer Golan.

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Conflict of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This study was approved by the Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Education (#10.32), and by the ethics committee of the Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University.

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Golan, O., Gordon, I., Fichman, K. et al. Specific Patterns of Emotion Recognition from Faces in Children with ASD: Results of a Cross-Modal Matching Paradigm. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 844–852 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3389-5

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