Abstract
The current study investigated whether those with higher levels of autism-like traits process emotional information from speech differently to those with lower levels of autism-like traits. Neurotypical adults completed the autism-spectrum quotient and an emotional priming task. Vocal primes with varied emotional prosody, semantics, or a combination, preceded emotional target faces. Prime-target pairs were congruent or incongruent in their emotional content. Overall, congruency effects were found for combined prosody-semantic primes, however no congruency effects were found for semantic or prosodic primes alone. Further, those with higher levels of autism-like traits were not influenced by the prime stimuli. These results suggest that failure to integrate emotional information across modalities may be characteristic of the broader autism phenotype.
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Permission to publish these stimuli was obtained from the stimuli developer Marc D. Pell
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Acknowledgements
The methods used in this study were based off a previous study by Pell, Jaywant, Monetta and Kotz (2011), who provided their stimuli to be used in the current study. This research was conducted with support from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Project ID: CE140100041).
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MW conceived of the study, participated in its design, performed data collection and statistical analysis, and drafted the manuscript; DC participated in the design and coordination of the study, and assisted with statistical analysis and interpretation; WA participated in the design and interpretation of the study and helped draft the manuscript, NN participated in interpretation of the data and helped draft the manuscript, AA participated in the design, coordination, data analysis, and interpretation of the study and helped draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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West, M.J., Copland, D.A., Arnott, W.L. et al. Effects of Prosodic and Semantic Cues on Facial Emotion Recognition in Relation to Autism-Like Traits. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 2611–2618 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3522-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3522-0