Can children with autism read emotions from the eyes? The Eyes Test revisited

Abstract

This study aimed to test two new, simplified tasks related to the eye-test, targeting children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing controls (TD). Test-1 assessed the recognition of emotion/mental states with displays using one word and two eyepictures, whereas Test-2 presented displays using two words and one eye-picture. Black and white photographs of children were used as materials. A cross-cultural study (Caucasian/East-Asian) with adults was initially carried out to verify generalizability across different ethnic groups. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses were used to compare emotion recognition from the eyes in the two tests. Trajectories were constructed linking performance on both tests either to chronological age or to different measures of mental age (receptive vocabulary based on the BPVS, CARS or ASQ for the ASD group). Performance improved with chronological age in both the ASD and TD groups of children. However, performance in Test-1 was significantly superior in children with ASD, who showed delayed onset and slower rate of improvement than TD children in Test-2. In both the ASD and TD groups the lowest error rate was recorded for the item 'anger', suggesting that threat-detection cue mechanisms may be intact in Autism. In general, all children showed good performance on our novel tests, thus making them good candidates for assessing younger children and those with lower general abilities.

Emotion recognition from the eye region in children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder in Arab and Scandinavian countries

“…Happiness, disgust, and neutral are all mostly recognized from the mouth region (29)(30)(31), and thus it may be that children with ASD are not used to recognizing these emotions from the eye area. Our findings support those of Fink et al (15) and Nuske et al (16), as eye region ER deficits in ASD appear not to be systematic or universal: Berggren et al (17) found deficits in happiness recognition in Scandinavian children with ASD, Franco et al (3) found deficits in happy/surprise and sad/angry definition in multi-ethnic, English children with ASD, and Kuusikko et al (18) found deficits in general ER in Scandinavian children with ASD.…”

“…Previous meta-analyses of ER show that ER is more accurate within the same cultural group, compared to cross-cultural ER (1,2). However, this in-group advantage appears to diminish in typically developing (TD) populations, when ER is made to rely primarily on the eye region (3,4).…”

“…Only a few studies, however, have examined basic ER skills from the eye region in children and adolescents with ASD (3,17,18), and none of them have examined basic ER skills in children with ASD deriving from Arab countries. In Arab countries, wearing a face-covering veil, such as a niqab or burqa, is more common than in Western countries.…”

Executive function predicts theory of mind but not social verbal communication in school-aged children with autism spectrum disorder

“…Less is known about the association of EF to emotion recognition abilities that are theoretically considered to be equally fundamental aspects of ToM and empathising in general (Golan et al, 2006). Indeed recent evidence has suggested that ToM should not be considered a single process as it includes two levels: cognitive and affective (Baron-Cohen et al 2015;Franco et al, 2014;Mazza et al, 2014Mazza et al, , 2017Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2009). Cognitive ToM refers to the ability to understand one's mental states (e.g.…”

Correlatos estructurales de las alteraciones cognitivas en niños con TEA

“…Específicamente, el componente cognitivo es la capacidad de entender lo que otros están pensando (es decir, sus estados mentales). Mientras que el componente afectivo es la capacidad de hacer inferencias con respecto a las emociones de otras personas (Franco et al, 2014;Mazza et al, 2014;Pino et al, 2016;Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer & Aharon-Peretz, 2005).…”