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 "We found that on average, young people with autism are a bit less
accurate at recognizing all expressions, not just the subtle ones,"
said lead study author Sarah Griffiths of the University of
Cambridge's Autism Research Center in the UK.
"The types of mistakes that children with autism make like confusing
scared and surprised are the same types of mistakes made by
typically developing children," Griffiths, who did the research at
the University of Bristol, said by email. "So it's not just that
children with autism interpret emotions completely differently, but
they are more likely to make common misinterpretations."
About one in 68 children have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which
includes autism as well as Asperger syndrome and other pervasive
developmental disorders, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. It is more often diagnosed in boys than in
girls.
People with autism often have problems with social, emotional and
communication skills. They might repeat certain behaviors and might
not want change in their daily activities. Many people with autism
also have different ways of learning, paying attention or reacting
to things.
Some previous research has linked autism to difficulties reading
facial expressions, but results have been mixed and certain studies
haven't found this evidence of this connection, researchers note in
the Journal of Autism Developmental Disorders.
For the study, researchers gave an online test of emotion
recognition to 63 children and teens with autism and to 64 youth
without this diagnosis. Participants saw “happy,” “sad,”
“surprised,” “disgusted,” “scared” and “angry” facial expressions;
some faces had exaggerated "high-intensity" emotions designed to be
easy to read and others had subtle "low-intensity" feelings designed
to be more challenging to interpret.
Participants were around 11 years old on average. Most of the kids
in the autism group were male, compared to about half of the
children in the group without autism.
The research team had expected to find a smaller difference between
the groups in recognizing high-intensity emotions.
Instead, they found a bigger difference with more intense emotions,
likely because children in both groups made similar errors in
recognizing subtle feelings. This made it hard for researchers to
detect clear differences between the kids with and without autism.
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One limitation of the study is that many participants who started
the online facial recognition test didn't finish it; this happened
with 30 percent of participants with autism, the authors note. This
might be because people are less likely to complete a repetitive
test online at home than they might be under supervision in a lab,
the researchers speculate. Another drawback of online testing is
that researchers lacked a confirmed clinical diagnosis of autism.
Still, previous brain imaging studies have found areas of the brain
involved in decoding emotions and facial expressions are less active
in people with autism, said Geraldine Dawson, director of the Duke
Center for Autism in Durham, North Carolina.
"The good news is that we can help people with autism learn to
interpret facial expressions," Dawson, who wasn't involved in the
current study, said by email.
"Early behavioral intervention focuses on helping the young child
with autism pay attention and respond appropriately to facial
expressions," Dawson added. "There are also training programs in
which people with autism can be taught explicitly what each facial
expression means and then practice these skills in real life
settings."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2oEh1Eo Journal of Autism and Developmental
Disorders, online March 31, 2017.
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