A multimodal approach to emotion recognition ability in autism spectrum disorders

Background:  Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterised by social and communication difficulties in day‐to‐day life, including problems in recognising emotions. However, experimental investigations of emotion recognition ability in ASD have been equivocal, hampered by small sample sizes, narr...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child psychology and psychiatry 2011-03, Vol.52 (3), p.275-285
Main Authors: Jones, Catherine R.G., Pickles, Andrew, Falcaro, Milena, Marsden, Anita J.S., Happé, Francesca, Scott, Sophie K., Sauter, Disa, Tregay, Jenifer, Phillips, Rebecca J., Baird, Gillian, Simonoff, Emily, Charman, Tony
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ability tests
Adolescent
Adolescents
Autism
Autism spectrum disorder
Autism Spectrum Disorders
Autistic spectrum disorders
Biological and medical sciences
Case-Control Studies
Child
Child clinical studies
Child Development Disorders, Pervasive - physiopathology
Child Psychology
Communication Skills
Confusion
Developmental disorders
Diagnostic Tests
Disability Identification
emotion processing
Emotion recognition
Emotional Intelligence
Emotions
Error Patterns
Evaluation Methods
Evidence
Facial Expression
Female
Humans
Infantile autism
Intelligence
Intelligence Quotient
Investigations
Male
Medical sciences
Pervasive Developmental Disorders
Psychiatry
Psychological Patterns
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Recognition
Recognition (Psychology)
social communication
structural equation modelling
Structural Equation Models
Task Analysis
Teenagers
Young Adult
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Background:  Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterised by social and communication difficulties in day‐to‐day life, including problems in recognising emotions. However, experimental investigations of emotion recognition ability in ASD have been equivocal, hampered by small sample sizes, narrow IQ range and over‐focus on the visual modality. Methods:  We tested 99 adolescents (mean age 15;6 years, mean IQ 85) with an ASD and 57 adolescents without an ASD (mean age 15;6 years, mean IQ 88) on a facial emotion recognition task and two vocal emotion recognition tasks (one verbal; one non‐verbal). Recognition of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust were tested. Using structural equation modelling, we conceptualised emotion recognition ability as a multimodal construct, measured by the three tasks. We examined how the mean levels of recognition of the six emotions differed by group (ASD vs. non‐ASD) and IQ (≥ 80 vs. < 80). Results:  We found no evidence of a fundamental emotion recognition deficit in the ASD group and analysis of error patterns suggested that the ASD group were vulnerable to the same pattern of confusions between emotions as the non‐ASD group. However, recognition ability was significantly impaired in the ASD group for surprise. IQ had a strong and significant effect on performance for the recognition of all six emotions, with higher IQ adolescents outperforming lower IQ adolescents. Conclusions:  The findings do not suggest a fundamental difficulty with the recognition of basic emotions in adolescents with ASD.
ISSN:0021-9630
1469-7610
DOI:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02328.x