Abstract
Twenty-six children and adolescents with autism and six normally developing peers participated in an intermodal preference study examining their perception of emotional expressions. Children were presented pairs of videotaped facial expressions accompanied by a single soundtrack affectively matching one of the two facial expressions. Overall, the children with autism looked less at these emotional expressions than did the normally developing children. Both groups of children looked preferentially to fearful facial expressions, irrespective of the accompanying vocal expression. The sound manipulation influenced the children's looking time to the sad and happy facial expressions. These patterns of looking were correlated with chronological age and PPVT scores for the children with autism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., and Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?Cognition 21: 37–46.
Dawson, G., and Lewy, A. (1989). Arousal, attention, and the socio-emotional impairments of individuals with autism. In Dawson, G. (eds.),Autism: Nature, Diagnosis and Treatment, Guilford, New York, pp. 49–74.
Ferrara, C., and Hill, S. (1980). The responsiveness of autistic children to the predictability of social and nonsocial toys.J. Aut. Devel. Dis. 10: 51–57.
Frith, U. (1989).Autism: Explaining the Enigma, Blackwell, Oxford.
Gibson, J. J. (1979/1986).The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Hillsdale, NJ.
Hobson, R. P. (1986). The autistic child's appraisal, of expressions of emotion.J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 27: 321–342.
Hobson, R. P. (1989). Beyond cognition: A theory of autism. In Dawson, G. (eds.),Autism: New Perspectives on Diagnosis, Nature and Treatment, Guilford Press, New York.
Hobson, R. P., Ouston J., and Lee, T. (1988). Emotion recognition in autism: Coordinating faces and voices.Psychological Med. 18: 911–923.
Huffman, L. R. (1994)Differential responses to emotion in children with autism, Dissertation, Rutgers University.
Izard, C. E. (1979).The Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement Coding System (MAX), University of Delaware, Newark, DE.
Kanner, L. (1943). Autistic disturbances of affective contact.Nerv. Child 2: 217–250.
Kreutzer, M. A., and Charlesworth, W. R. (1983, March).Infants' Reactions to Different Expressions of Emotions, Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia.
LaBarbera, J. D., Izard, C. E., Vietze, P., and Parisi, S. A. (1976).Child Devel 47: 535–538.
Leslie, A. M. (1987) Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind”.Psychol. Rev. 94(4): 412–426.
Loveland, K. A., Tunali-Kotoski, B., Chen, R., Brelsford, K. A., Ortegon, J., and Pearson, D. A. (1995). Intermodal perception of affect in persons with autism or Down syndrome.Devel. Psychopathol. 7: 409–418.
Nelson, C. A., Morse, D. A., and Leavitt, L. A. (1979). Recognition of facial expressions by seven-month-old infants.Child Devel. 50: 1239–1242.
Prior, M., Dahlstrom, B., and Squires, T. L. (1990). Autistic children's knowledge of thinking and feeling states in other people.J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 31: 587–601.
Rose, S. A., and Ruff, H. A. (1987). Cross-modal abilities in human infants. In Osofsky, J.D. (ed.),Handbook of Infant Development, Wiley, New York, pp. 318–362.
Spelke, E. S. (1976). Infants' intermodal perception of events.Cogn. Psychol. 8: 553–560.
Walker, A. S. (1982). Intermodal perception of expressive behaviors by human infants.J. Exp. Child Psychol. 33: 514–535.
Walker-Andrews, A. S. (1988). Infants' perception of the affordances of expressive behaviors. In Rovee-Collier, C.K. (ed.),Advances in Infancy Research, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, pp. 173–221.
Walker-Andrews, A. S., Haviland, J. M., Huffman, L. R., and Toci, L. (1994). Brief report: Preferential looking in intermodal perception by children with autism,J. Autism Devel. Dis. 24: 99–107.
Wilcox, B., and Clayton, F. (1968). Infant visual fixation on motion pictures of the human face.J. Exp. Child Psychol. 6: 22–32.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Haviland, J.M., Walker-Andrews, A.S., Huffman, L.R. et al. Intermodal perception of emotional expressions by children with autism. J Dev Phys Disabil 8, 77–88 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02578441
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02578441