Diminished sensitivity and specificity at recognising facial emotional expressions of varying intensity underlie emotion-specific recognition deficits in autism spectrum disorders

Abstract

A B S T R A C TBackground: A plethora of research on facial emotion recognition in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exists and reported deficits in ASD compared to controls, particularly for negative basic emotions. However, these studies have largely used static high intensity stimuli. The current study investigated facial emotion recognition across three levels of expression intensity from videos, looking at accuracy rates to investigate impairments in facial emotion recognition and error patterns ('confusions') to explore potential underlying factors. Method: Twelve individuals with ASD (9 M/3F; M(age) = 17.3) and 12 matched controls (9 M/3F; M(age) = 16.9) completed a facial emotion recognition task including 9 emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, happiness, contempt, embarrassment, pride) and neutral, each expressed by 12 encoders at low, intermediate, and high intensity. Results: A facial emotion recognition deficit was found overall for the ASD group compared to controls, as well as deficits in recognising individual negative emotions at varying expression intensities. Compared to controls, the ASD group showed significantly more, albeit typical, confusions between emotion categories (at high intensity), and significantly more confusions of emotions as 'neutral' (at low intensity). Conclusions: The facial emotion recognition deficits identified in ASD, particularly for negative emotions, are in line with previous studies using other types of stimuli. Error analysis showed that individuals with ASD had difficulties detecting emotional information in the face (sensitivity) at low intensity, and correctly identifying emotional information (specificity) at high intensity. These results suggest different underlying mechanisms for the facial emotion recognition deficits at low vs high expression intensity.

Is it avoidance or hypoarousal? A systematic review of emotion recognition, eye-tracking, and psychophysiological studies in young adults with autism spectrum conditions

“…For instance, specific face regions (i.e., mouth, eye) have been shown to be more diagnostic or informative for subtle as opposed to extreme facial expressions (Cassidy et al, 2015;Golan et al, 2006;Hernandez et al, 2009;Pelphrey et al, 2007;Philip, Whalley, Stanfield, Sprenglemeyer, & Santos, 2010;Smith et al, 2010). Validating the importance to account for stimuli intensity, a recent study that varied stimuli intensity reported diminished sensitivity in emotion processing for low to medium but not high emotional expressions in ASC (Wingenbach, Ashwin, & Brosnan, 2017).…”

Brief Report: Intuitive and Reflective Reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…For example, the Dual Process Theory of ASD would propose that ASD is characterised by difficulties processing rapid social heuristics, such as low intensity facial emotion expressions (e.g. Wingenbach, Ashwin & Brosnan, 2017), rather than a deficit in empathy (although there may be downstream consequences for empathy of impaired facial emotion recognition capabilities; e.g. Clark, Winkielman, & McIntosh, 2008).…”

Sex differences in facial emotion recognition across varying expression intensity levels from videos

“…None of the participants reported a clinical diagnosis of a mental disorder. The data of 104 participants of this sample has been used in previous analyses reported in Wingenbach et al [ 27 , 28 ], but sex differences were not investigated in those reports. Ethical approval was given by the University of Bath Psychology Ethics Committee, and all participants gave written informed consent prior to participation.…”