Emotion recognition in autism spectrum disorder across age groups: A cross‐sectional investigation of various visual and auditory communicative domains

Abstract

Previous research on emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has predominantly focused on human faces and speech prosody, with little attention paid to other domains such as nonhuman faces and music. In addition, emotion processing in different domains was often examined in separate studies, making it challenging to evaluate whether emotion recognition difficulties in ASD generalize across domains and age cohorts. The present study investigated: (i) the recognition of basic emotions (angry, scared, happy, and sad) across four domains (human faces, face-like objects, speech prosody, and song) in 38 autistic and 38 neurotypical (NT) children, adolescents, and adults in a forced-choice labeling task, and (ii) the impact of pitch and visual processing profiles on this ability. Results showed similar recognition accuracy between the ASD and NT groups across age groups for all domains and emotion types, although processing speed was slower in the ASD compared to the NT group. Age-related differences were seen in both groups, which varied by emotion, domain, and performance index. Visual processing style was associated with facial emotion recognition speed and pitch perception ability with auditory emotion recognition in the NT group but not in the ASD group. These findings suggest that autistic individuals may employ different emotion processing strategies compared to NT individuals, and that emotion recognition difficulties as manifested by slower response times may result from a generalized, rather than a domain-specific underlying mechanism that governs emotion recognition processes across domains in ASD.

Investigating implicit emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder across age groups: A cross‐modal emotional priming study

“…Importantly, the varied emotional priming patterns in the autism and neurotypical groups cannot be attributed to their baseline emotion recognition abilities (i.e., in the absence of priming). As reported in a separate study with the same sample, no significant differences in emotion recognition accuracy between autistic and neurotypical groups were found across ages for all four types of stimuli (Leung et al, 2023).…”

“…The current stimulus set was developed from the Ryerson Audio‐Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS; Livingstone & Russo, 2018) and validated for emotional content reliability by an independent group of judges as part of a previous study (see Leung et al, 2023 for full details). This set included a total of 16 spoken and 16 sung words (i.e., “ door ”) to be used as auditory primes, and 64 facial and 64 face‐like object images to be used as visual targets in this study.…”

“…As the first study to investigate implicit emotion processing in autism from a multi-domain perspective, prototypical emotional expressions were used as stimuli to signify relatively comparable levels of recognition difficulty across domains, while ensuring sufficient saliency of these stimuli for priming and their suitability to accommodate the wide age range of participants (see Leung et al, 2023). The use of prototypical expressions may have reduced the sensitivity of the present task in detecting subtle differences between the autism and neurotypical groups.…”

“…Secondly, gaining insight into emotion processing in autism requires not only describing differences between autistic and neurotypical individuals, but also tracking and understanding how differences emerge over development. Consistent evidence indicates that group differences in explicit emotion processing of human faces between autistic and neurotypical individuals are notably more pronounced among adults, whereas these differences are less prominent among younger groups (e.g., Lozier et al, 2014;O'Hearn & Lynn, 2023;Rump et al, 2009; but also see Leung et al, 2023). This notion may be attributed to a plateau in the development of this skill beyond late childhood in autism, in contrast to the continuous maturation of such skills through into adulthood in neurotypical development (Rump et al, 2009).…”

“…This differentiation is supported by evidence that suggests a dissociation between the two processes, such that impairment at the explicit level does not necessarily imply impairment at the implicit level (e.g., Roux et al, 2010; Wagenbreth et al, 2016; Wieser et al, 2006). Thus, while several studies indicate that differences in explicit emotion processing between autistic and neurotypical individuals are likely driven by domain‐general mechanisms, with comparatively poorer accuracy and slower response speed in the autism group generalized across domains (e.g., Leung et al, 2023; Philip et al, 2010), inferring implicit emotion processing in autism from these findings is challenging due to the dissociation between the two processing levels. Crucially, our understanding of implicit emotion processing in autism remains limited due to the lack of research adopting a multi‐domain approach.…”