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“Who Said That?” Matching of Low- and High-Intensity Emotional Prosody to Facial Expressions by Adolescents with ASD

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Abstract

Data on emotion processing by individuals with ASD suggest both intact abilities and significant deficits. Signal intensity may be a contributing factor to this discrepancy. We presented low- and high-intensity emotional stimuli in a face-voice matching task to 22 adolescents with ASD and 22 typically developing (TD) peers. Participants heard semantically neutral sentences with happy, surprised, angry, and sad prosody presented at two intensity levels (low, high) and matched them to emotional faces. The facial expression choice was either across- or within-valence. Both groups were less accurate for low-intensity emotions, but the ASD participants’ accuracy levels dropped off more sharply. ASD participants were significantly less accurate than their TD peers for trials involving low-intensity emotions and within-valence face contrasts.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Rhyannon Bemis, Chris Connolly, and Meaghan Kennedy, for their assistance in stimulus creation, task administration, and data analysis. We also thank the children and families who gave their time to participate in this study. Funding was provided by NAAR, NIDCD (U19 DC03610; H. Tager-Flusberg, PI) which is part of the NICHD/NIDCD Collaborative Programs of Excellence in Autism, and by grant M01-RR00533 from the General Clinical Research Ctr. program of the National Center for Research Resources, National Institutes of Health. The corresponding author is currently supported by NIDCD (R21 DC010867-01; R Grossman, PI). A version of this paper was presented as a poster at the International Meeting for Autism Research in 2009.

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  1. Ruth B. Grossman

    Present address: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Emerson College, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA, 02116, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shriver Center, University of Massachusetts Medical School, 200 Trapelo Road, Waltham, MA, 02452, USA

    Ruth B. Grossman

  2. Department of Psychology, Boston University, 64 Cummington Street, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Helen Tager-Flusberg

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  1. Ruth B. Grossman
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  2. Helen Tager-Flusberg
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Correspondence to Ruth B. Grossman.

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Development of the MacBrain Face Stimulus Set was overseen by Nim Tottenham and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development. Please contact Nim Tottenham at tott0006@tc.umn.edu for more information concerning the stimulus set.

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Grossman, R.B., Tager-Flusberg, H. “Who Said That?” Matching of Low- and High-Intensity Emotional Prosody to Facial Expressions by Adolescents with ASD. J Autism Dev Disord 42, 2546–2557 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1511-2

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