Brief Report: Perception and Lateralization of Spoken Emotion by Youths with High-Functioning Forms of Autism

Abstract

The perception and the cerebral lateralization of spoken emotions were investigated in children and adolescents with high-functioning forms of autism (HFFA), and age-matched typically developing controls (TDC). A dichotic listening task using nonsense passages was used to investigate the recognition of four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and neutrality. The participants with HFFA did not differ significantly in overall performance from the TDC, suggesting that the pervasive difficulty in processing emotions is not uniformly present in emotions expressed verbally. Both groups demonstrated a left-ear effect for the perception of emotion in nonsense passages, consistent with overall right-hemisphere superiority for this function.

Emotion processing in early blind and sighted individuals.

“…In fact, recent evidence suggests that the often observed right-hemispheric dominance in processing facial emotional expressions may indeed depend on the right-lateralized network for face processing (Worley & Boles, 2016). In this regard, it is interesting that individuals who show developmental delays associated with autism spectrum disorder (and whose prevalence is particularly high in blind children, Jure, Pogonza, & Rapin, 2016) also present abnormal hemispheric lateralization in different tasks (Floris et al, 2016; Herringshaw, Ammons, DeRamus, & Kana, 2016; but see Baker, Montgomery, & Abramson, 2010), including atypical hemispheric specialization for faces (Keehn, Vogel-Farley, Tager-Flusberg, & Nelson, 2015). …”

Influences of Semantic and Prosodic Cues on Word Repetition and Categorization in Autism

“…At the same time, several studies have demonstrated comparable abilities in individuals with HFA and TD controls (Baker, Montgomery, & Abramson, 2010;Brennand, Schepman, & Rodway, 2011;Grossman, Bemis, Plesa Skwerer, & Tager-Flusberg, 2010;O'Connor, 2007), suggesting that the perception of emotional prosody is not significantly impaired in individuals with HFA. Although it remains unclear why research in this area has yielded such inconsistent findings, possible explanations that have been ventured include effects of task demands, influences of verbal and nonverbal IQ on emotion perception, and heterogeneity within the individuals with HFA.…”

Knowledge or Performance - Why Youth with Autism Experience Social Problems

“…Accurate recognition of affect is a requisite skill for adaptive social functioning and a noted domain of impairment in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; Baker, Montgomery, & Abramson, 2010;Philip et al, 2010;Rump et al, 2009). Deficits in identification of emotional content in faces (Rump et al, 2009) and voices (e.g., prosody; Baker et al, 2010) are well-documented in this population and are posited to represent a core deficit (Philip et al, 2010).…”

“…Deficits in identification of emotional content in faces (Rump et al, 2009) and voices (e.g., prosody; Baker et al, 2010) are well-documented in this population and are posited to represent a core deficit (Philip et al, 2010). Nevertheless, some research reveals subgroups of individuals with ASD who exhibit relatively preserved emotion recognition ability (Bal et al, 2010;Kuusikko et al, 2009;O'Connor et al, 2005), highlighting the under-studied topic of variability within ASD.…”