Examining the bidirectional association between emotion recognition and autistic traits using observational and genetic analyses

Abstract

Background: There is mixed evidence for an association between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and emotion recognition deficits. We sought to assess the bidirectionality of this association using phenotypic and genetic data in a large community sample. Methods: Analyses were conducted in three stages. First, we examined the bidirectional association between ASD symptoms at age 16 years and emotion recognition task (ERT) responses at age 24 years (Study 1; N=3,579); and between Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA) emotion recognition responses at age 8 years and ASD symptoms at age 16 years (Study 2; N=8,545). Next, we examined the association between these phenotypes and polygenic risk scores for these. Finally, the genetic correlation between ASD and ERT responses at age 24 was estimated. Analyses were conducted in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Results: ASD symptoms at age 16 years were associated with later total correct responses on ERT in Study 1 (beta=-0.17; 95% CI: -0.26 to -0.08). However, there was no clear evidence of an association in Study 2 after adjusting for confounders (beta=-0.004; 95% CI: -0.03 to 0.02). We observed a negative association between ERT polygenic risk score and ASD symptoms (beta=-0.23; 95% CI: -0.33 to -0.13;). However, we found the opposite association between the ASD polygenic risk score and ERT (beta=0.40; 95% CI: 0.10 to 0.70). We observed a moderate genetic correlation between ASD and ERT (r=0.30), but the statistical evidence for this was very weak. Conclusion: We found an observational association between poorer emotion recognition and increased ASD symptoms. Our genetic analyses revealed an association between ERT polygenic risk scores and ASD symptoms, which may suggest a shared genetic aetiology between these or a potential causal pathway. Our results may inform interventions targeting emotion recognition.

Assessing the effectiveness of online emotion recognition training in healthy volunteers

“…Finally, we note that including the AQ-10 scores in study 2 did not make a meaningful difference to our results, suggesting that participants' level of autistic traits did not influence our training effect. However, as this was a sample of healthy volunteers, AQ-10 scores are likely to be lower than in autistic individuals where ER difficulties have been previously reported and baseline ER accuracy is likely to be lower [11][12][13]. Thus, ERT may be more beneficial for autistic individuals, and it would be useful for future research to examine the effectiveness of ERT, in an autistic sample and other populations, that may particularly stand to benefit from improved facial ER accuracy.…”

“…For example, poorer emotion recognition (ER) has been found in individuals with depression [8,9], and this may be a causal factor in the maintenance of depressive symptoms [10]. Similarly, autistic individuals or those scoring higher on autistic trait measures tend to have lower accuracy for global ER [11][12][13]. This may have implications for social development and interpersonal skills over time [14].…”

Multimodal Evidence of Atypical Processing of Eye Gaze and Facial Emotion in Children With Autistic Traits

“…The struggle to recognize emotions from facial expressions is one of the earliest identifiable markers of ASD (Dawson et al, 2005). In a large sample Reed et al (2020) have found behavioral and genetic evidence for poorer emotion recognition with increasing autistic traits. In neuroimaging studies using facial emotion recognition tasks (Harms et al, 2010), individuals with ASD demonstrated altered processing (Johnson et al, 2015) in the amygdala (Dalton et al, 2005), fusiform gyri (Pierce et al, 2004;Pierce and Redcay, 2008), and posterior superior temporal gyri (Pelphrey et al, 2005).…”