Is Autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Specific Learning Disorder linked to Impaired Emotion Recognition in Primary School Aged Children?

Let’s face it! The role of social anxiety and executive functions in recognizing others’ emotions from faces: Evidence from autism and specific learning disorders

“…However, the overall picture of FER in autism is inconsistent, and complicated by the substantial variability between the huge amount of studies in task features, and participants' characteristics, which could count as potential moderating factors contributing to the mixed findings in the literature (for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, see Black et al, 2017;Harms et al, 2010;Leung et al, 2022;Lozier et al, 2014;Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013;Yeung, 2022). Some studies have identified a generalized face-emotion recognition deficit across all emotional facial expressions in autistic children (Lindner & Rosén, 2006;Lozier et al, 2014;Rump et al, 2009), whereas others revealed a lower performance for one or a subset of expressions, highlighting emotion-specific challenges mainly for negative emotions, which have variously included anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and surprise (see for example, Ashwin et al, 2007;Economides et al, 2020;Humphreys et al, 2007). Moreover, challenges with emotion recognition in ASD might also vary based on the type of measure (i.e., accuracy vs reaction times), task (i.e., verbal vs non-verbal), emotion complexity (i.e., basic vs complex emotions), processing (i.e., holistic vs featural), and stimuli (i.e., faces vs speech prosody) (for reviews and meta-analyses see, Leung et al, 2022;Lievore et al, 2023;Yeung, 2022).…”

“…Some authors have explored whether children with SLD might face challenges with recognizing others' emotions. Despite the limited number of research in this area, most studies revealed that individuals with SLD were more inaccurate and slower in detecting facial emotions as compared to non-diagnosed participants (Albayrak et al, 2022;Bloom & Heath, 2010;Ciray & Turan, 2022;Economides et al, 2020;Operto et al, 2020). Specific-emotion difficulties (e.g., for angry faces; Ciray & Turan, 2022) emerge as well as a generalized challenge, with the tendency to assign some emotional states to neutral expressions (Operto et al, 2020).…”

“…Specific-emotion difficulties (e.g., for angry faces; Ciray & Turan, 2022) emerge as well as a generalized challenge, with the tendency to assign some emotional states to neutral expressions (Operto et al, 2020). Some authors concluded that problems with FER might be specifically related to high-level visual deficit (Economides et al, 2020); people with dyslexia, a subtype of SLD that impacts reading ability, matched faces more slowly, especially when the faces differed in viewpoint, and discriminated more poorly between similar faces (but not cars) (Gabay et al, 2017;Sigurdardottir et al, 2015;Tarkiainen et al, 2003). However, research is still needed to disentangle the possible mechanisms that underlie challenges with others' emotion detection from facial expressions in children with SLD.…”