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Selective Impairment of Basic Emotion Recognition in People with Autism: Discrimination Thresholds for Recognition of Facial Expressions of Varying Intensities

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders volume 48, pages 1886–1894 (2018)Cite this article

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by early onset qualitative impairments in reciprocal social development. However, whether individuals with ASD exhibit impaired recognition of facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions is debatable. To investigate subtle deficits in facial emotion recognition, we asked 14 children diagnosed with high-functioning autism (HFA)/AS and 17 typically developing peers to complete a new highly sensitive test of facial emotion recognition. The test stimuli comprised faces expressing increasing degrees of emotional intensity that slowly changed from a neutral to a full-intensity happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, or fear expression. We assessed individual differences in the intensity of stimuli required to make accurate judgments about emotional expressions. We found that, different emotions had different identification thresholds and the two groups were generally similar in terms of the sequence of discrimination threshold of six basic expressions. It was easier for individuals in both groups to identify emotions that were relatively fully expressed (e.g., intensity > 50%). Compared with control participants, children with ASD generally required stimuli with significantly greater intensity for the correct identification of anger, disgust, and fear expressions. These results suggest that individuals with ASD do not have a general but rather a selective impairment in basic emotion recognition.

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Acknowledgments

The funding was provided by MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (13YJC190020), Peak Discipline Construction Project of Education at ECNU. The thesis is the initial result of the project “Selective impairment of expression processing in children with autism spectrum disorder” supported by Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Plan.

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Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Yongning Song

  2. School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Yongning Song

  3. Faculty of Human Development and Education, Kyoto Women’s University, Kyoto, Japan

    Yuji Hakoda

  4. Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics, Ministry of Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Yongning Song

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  1. Yongning Song
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  2. Yuji Hakoda
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Contributions

YS and YH: conceived and designed the experiments. YS: performed the experiments. YS: analyzed the data. YS and YH: wrote the paper. YS and YH: revised the paper.

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Correspondence to Yongning Song.

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Ethical Approval

The internal review board of the East China Normal University approved our experimental procedures.

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We obtained written informed consent from all participants prior to testing.

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Song, Y., Hakoda, Y. Selective Impairment of Basic Emotion Recognition in People with Autism: Discrimination Thresholds for Recognition of Facial Expressions of Varying Intensities. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 1886–1894 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3428-2

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Keywords

  • Autism spectrum disorder
  • Emotion
  • Threshold