No abstract

The findings do not suggest a fundamental difficulty with the recognition of basic emotions in adolescents with ASD.

Although it has been well established that individuals with autism exhibit difficulties in their face recognition abilities, it has been debated whether this deficit reflects a category-specific impairment of faces or a general perceptual bias toward the local level information in a stimulus. In this study, the Let’s Face It! Skills Battery (Tanaka & Schultz, 2008) of developmental face and object processing measures was administered to a large sample of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typical developing (TD) children. The main finding was that when matched for age and IQ, individuals with ASD were selectively impaired in their ability to recognize faces across changes in orientation, expression and featural information. In a face discrimination task, ASD participants showed a preserved ability to discriminate featural and configural information in the mouth region of a face, but were compromised in their ability to discriminate featural and configural information in the eyes. On object processing tasks, ASD participants demonstrated a normal ability to recognize automobiles across changes in orientation and a superior ability to discriminate featural and configural information in houses. These findings indicate that the face processing deficits in ASD are not due to a local processing bias, but reflect a category-specific impairment of faces characterized by a failure to form view-invariant face representations and discriminate information in the eye region of the face.

Our aim was to develop an age-appropriate measure of early manifestations of aggression. We constructed a questionnaire about normative developmental milestones into which a set of items measuring infants' use of physical force against people and expressed anger were included. These items comprise the Cardiff Infant Contentiousness Scale (CICS). Evidence for the reliability and validity of the CICS is provided from analyses of a sample of N=310 British infants, assessed at a mean age of 6 months as part of a larger longitudinal study of the development of aggression. The informants' CICS ratings demonstrated reasonable levels of internal consistency and interrater agreement. Informants' ratings were validated by observations of infants' distress in response to restraint in a car seat. Longitudinal analyses revealed that contentiousness was stable over time and that contentiousness at 6 months predicted infants' later use of force with peers. When used in the company of other methods, the simple four-item CICS scale could serve as a useful screen for early manifestations of aggressiveness in human infants.

We tested the hypothesis that developmental precursors to aggression are apparent in infancy. Up to three informants rated 301 firstborn infants for early signs of anger, hitting and biting; 279 (93%) were assessed again as toddlers. Informants' ratings were validated by direct observation at both ages. The precursor behaviours were significantly associated with known risk factors for high levels of aggressiveness. Individual differences were stable from early infancy to the third year and predicted broader conduct problems. These findings suggest that some individuals set forth on the trajectory to high levels of aggression by 6 months of age. The findings have implications for developmental studies of aggression, clinical prevention and intervention strategies, and theoretical considerations regarding the detection of precursors in different domains of development.