Psycho-Social Characteristics of Children with Prenatal Alcohol Exposure, Compared to Children with Down Syndrome and Typical Children

Abstract

The aim of this study was to extend the literature on cognitive and psychosocial adjustment and on facial processing in children with Prenatal Alcohol Exposure (PAE). Twenty-five children with PAE, 23 neurotypical children, and 13 children with Down syndrome matched on sex and mental age participated. Parents or guardians completed the Conners Comprehensive Behavior Rating Scale for Parents and the Social Responsiveness Scale; participants completed facial processing tasks. Using MANOVAs, the PAE group had substantially higher standard scores on all CBRS-P and SRS subscales compared with the typical group, and on almost all of them compared with the Down syndrome group. A large portion of individuals in the PAE group had clinically significant scores on the CBRS-P subscales, including ADHD, conduct and oppositional/defiant disorder, autism spectrum disorder, major depression, manic episodes, generalized and separation anxiety and phobias. Using a MANCOVA, no group differences were found in facial processing between the PAE and the neurotypical groups. Many children with PAE had scores that exceeded cut-offs for autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, conduct disorder, oppositional/defiant disorder, major depression, manic episodes, generalized and separation anxiety, and phobias. In addition, academic, language and mathematics problems were noted relative to typical children. Finally, children with PAE performed just as well on the facial processing tasks as a group of younger typical children of equal mental age. That means that facial processing by children with PAE was corresponded with their mental age.

Emotion Knowledge in Children and Adolescents With Down Syndrome: A New Methodological Approach

“…Although our findings of static facial emotion recognition (Static Faces task) conflict with the extant research findings that children and adolescents with DS perform worse than MA-or skillmatched TD participants on measures of facial emotion recognition (Way & Rojahn, 2012;Williams et al, 2005;Wishart et al, 2007;Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000), the Static Faces measure that we used differed from those used in prior research in key ways. The prior studies of facial emotion recognition in DS included tasks in which participants were asked to match black-andwhite (except in Way & Rojahn, 2012) photographs of adult faces expressing basic emotions.…”

“…Both the TD and DS samples in our studies were similar to the TD and DS samples used in the prior studies of facial emotion recognition in DS in terms of chronological and mental ages, though our studies used the PPVT-4 as a proxy for MA. Prior studies of emotion knowledge in DS have used various criteria for matching their samples; many used receptive vocabulary MA as the sole criterion (Turk & Cornish, 1998;Way & Rojahn, 2012) or one of multiple criteria (Kasari et al, 2001;Wishart et al, 2007). Some of these studies, however, also included a measure of nonverbal cognitive ability or general developmental age (Kasari et al, 2001;Wishart et al, 2007; see also Williams et al, 2005).…”

“…The prior studies of facial emotion recognition in DS included tasks in which participants were asked to match black-andwhite (except in Way & Rojahn, 2012) photographs of adult faces expressing basic emotions. We used color photographs of child facial expressions of basic emotions presented on a computer screen, and participants were asked to label the emotion expressions and match them to schematic faces.…”

“…The few research groups who have studied emotion knowledge in DS have almost exclusively limited their focus to the recognition of emotions from facial expressions (Way & Rojahn, 2012;Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005;Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007;Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000). This is presumably because facial emotion recognition ability develops rapidly during the preschool years in TD children whose mental ages (MAs) are comparable to those of youth with DS in these studies.…”

“…We chose receptive vocabulary as the matching criterion because prior studies on emotion recognition in DS have used the PPVT (or its British equivalent-British Picture Vocabulary Scale; Turk & Cornish, 1998;Way & Rojahn, 2012) or another measure of language ability (Kasari et al, 2001;Wishart et al, 2007) as a matching criterion. Also, receptive vocabulary has been related to emotion knowledge (Barrett, Lindquist, & Gendron, 2007) and is a common variable taken into account when measuring TD children's emotion recognition abilities (Izard et al, 2001;Izard et al, 2011).…”