Contributions to the Cognitive Study of Facial Recognition on Down Syndrome: A New Approximation to Exploring Facial Emotion Processing Style

Abstract

Background: This paper aimed to explore the ability of people with Down syndrome (PWDS) in recognizing facial emotion by considering automatic cognitive processing levels of face recognition. Method: A sample of PWDS and participants with typical development (PWTD) participated in a set of two affective priming studies. In each study, participants had to categorize an emotional or neutral target face that was preceded by another emotional face. Stimuli presentation for each facial set (one face after another) was conducted by using an stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 300 ms with the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) set at 50 ms. The first affective priming study manipulated emotion congruency between prime and target emotional faces to explore emotion classification abilities and to identify the cognitive mechanisms underlying automatic recognition of some emotional faces. The second study explored the effect that gender of a face has over categorization of facial emotion and difficulty in recognizing negative facial expressions. Results: The results strongly suggest that not all of the PWDS present difficulties in recognizing negative facial emotions. PWDS' performance pattern in categorizing emotion was similar to that of PWTDs if they had to use broad classification categories (e.g., emotion vs. no emotion). However, differences between both samples occurred if PWDS had to use a specific category task (e.g., classification of happiness, sadness, etc.). Conclusions: At least two emotion information processing styles can be identified in PWDS. Methodological and theoretical implications for exploring the emotional capabilities of people with DS are discussed.

Down Syndrome Cognitive Constraints to Recognize Negative Emotion Face Information: Eye Tracking Correlates

“…In this study we sought to explore eye gaze patterns typifying DS emotion face recognition as different from typical individuals. In accordance to previous affective priming studies dealing with automatic processing of emotion face information studies (Morales et al, 2014;Morales & Lopez, 2013;Morales & Lopez, 2010), DS participants showed lower accuracy to categorize negative face information when compared to typical individuals' emotion face recognition accuracy. Furthermore, different gaze patterns to static photographs of emotion faces were obtained from both samples (DS vs typical).…”

“…In order to accomplish this research goal both samples were required to take an affective priming as well as to participate in an eye tracking study. The affective priming study was a control to assure that typical participants were capable of differential automatic processing recognition of valenced face stimuli (Musch & Klauer, 2003) whereas DS participants were not capable of cognitive automatic processing of negative face stimuli (Morales et al, 2014).…”

“…Complementary research suggests the possibility for a DS specific cognitive information processing style tuned to discriminate negative faces from other emotion faces (Conrad, Schmidt, Niccols, Polak, Riniolo, & Burack, 2007;Morales & Lopez, 2010;Morales, Lopez, Castro, Charles, & Mezquita, 2014).…”

“…Recently, a set of affective priming studies were carried over to explore PWDS' affective style to recognize emotion face information. First, participants' abilities to identify and categorize emotion were identified (Morales & Lopez, 2010, Morales et al, 2014, then familiarity effects over emotion face recognition were explored (Morales & Lopez, 2010). Finally, their affective style to recognize emotion face information was determined (configural vs. analytic) (Morales, 2010).…”

“…Furthermore, the capacity shown by some PWDS to correctly categorize negative face emotions did not extend to all spectra of negative information. Here, for some DS study participants was harder to recognize angry and fear emotions (specially over female faces) and for other participants the categorization of faces showing sadness (Morales et al, 2014), b) PWDS seem to process differently positive familiar faces from unfamiliar positive faces and c) a configural face recognition style typifies most of DS study samples as it is the case over typical adults (e.g., Shimamura, Ross, & Bennett, 2006).…”