Impaired Recognition of Static and Dynamic Facial Emotions in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Stimuli of Varying Intensities, Different Genders, and Age Ranges Faces

Abstract

A multitude of research on facial emotion recognition (FER) in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been published since several years. However, these studies have mainly used static high intensity stimuli, including adult and/or children facial emotions. This current study investigated FER in children with ASD using an innovative task, composed of a combination of static (114 pictures) and dynamic (36 videos) subtests, including children, adolescent, and adult male and female faces, with high, medium, and low intensity of basic facial emotions, and neutral expression. The ASD group consisted of 45 Tunisian verbal children, and the control group consisted of 117 tunisian typically developing children. Both groups were aged 7–12 years. After adjusting for sex, age, mental age, and school grade, the ASD group scored lower than controls on all tests except for the recognition of happiness and fear in the static subtest, and the recognition of happiness, fear, and sadness in the dynamic subtest (p ≥ 0.05). In the ASD group, the total score of both the static and the dynamic subtest were positively correlated with the school grade (p < 0.001), but not with age, or mental age. Children with ASD performed better in recognizing facial emotions in children than in adults and adolescents on videos and photos (p < 0.001). Impairments in FER would have negative impact on the child's social development. Thus, the creation of new intervention instruments aiming to improve emotion recognition strategies at an early stage to individuals with ASD seems fundamental.

Effects of temporal properties of facial expressions on the perceived intensity of emotion

“…To investigate this limitation, future studies should consider manipulating the emotional ratio (or onset timing) while controlling the total intensity of transformed facial expressions. Second, our sample sizes were smaller than those in some previous studies, which also investigated the relationship between autism and facial emotion recognition [62,63]. However, our sample sizes were comparable to those in other previous studies [45][46][47].…”

Is visual gaze in children with autism spectrum disorder related to sequence of emotion intensity presentation? An eye‐tracking study of natural emotion perception processes

“…Intensity of emotion plays an important role in emotion expression and perception (Jelili et al, 2021; Smith et al, 2010), and different brain regions may be activated by different emotion intensities (Moodie et al, 2020). Children are susceptible to changes in emotion intensity, and infants as young as 4 months old can readily distinguish between fearful facial expressions of different intensities (Kuchuk & Bornstein, 1986).…”

“…Static pictures were used in most of the previous studies. Static pictures were not ecologically‐valid as they presented non‐natural images of the faces of individual characters (Griffiths et al, 2019; Jelili et al, 2021). They ignored the important information such as posture and scenes (Baron‐Cohen et al, 2009), and did not reflect natural social scenes. Inclusion of audio.…”

“…In recent years, researchers noted the importance of strength of emotion in emotion perception studies, but results were not consistent. Most studies concluded a minor (Walsh et al, 2014) or a lack of (Jelili et al, 2021) difference in emotion perception between ASD and TD children under more potent emotional stimuli, while a remarkable difference was observed for weaker emotional stimuli (Wong et al, 2012). However, some studies suggested that the differences emotion perception by children with ASD, when compared to TD children, were consistent across emotional stimuli of different intensities (Song & Hakoda, 2018).…”

Transforming Psychological Testing With Saccadic Responses: Internal Consistency is High for Rorschach and Facial Expressions

“…The Rorschach is widely researched and administered (Groth-Marnat & Wright, 2016), and, despite extensive debate regarding its scoring reliability and clinical validity (e.g., Wood et al, 2003), the development and introduction of the R-PAS scoring system (Meyer et al, 2011) is intended to address critics, and many clinicians and researchers remain convinced that it has sufficient reliability and validity for assessing psychosis, reality testing, thought disturbance, preoccupations and intrusions of mental imagery, cognitive complexity and other functions (e.g.,; Mihura et al, 2013; 2015; Mihura, & Meyer, 2018). Regarding facial expressions, visual perceptions of faces have been found to be important in social interactions, and are adaptively and homogeneously interpreted by healthy observers, such that deficits of facial expression and interpretation may indicate disordered processing as for example in schizophrenia (van Dijke et al, 2016), autism (Jelili et al, 2021) and psychopathy (Olderbak et al, 2021). Although both the Rorschach and facial expression tasks involve the presentation of symmetrical images, they each carry different processing demands, and it is uncertain what, if any, eye tracking measures might be consistently obtained across these different tasks.…”