Specific Patterns of Emotion Recognition from Faces in Children with ASD: Results of a Cross-Modal Matching Paradigm

Ofer Golan*, Ilanit Gordon, Keren Fichman, Giora Keinan

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

Children with ASD show emotion recognition difficulties, as part of their social communication deficits. We examined facial emotion recognition (FER) in intellectually disabled children with ASD and in younger typically developing (TD) controls, matched on mental age. Our emotion-matching paradigm employed three different modalities: facial, vocal and verbal. Results confirmed overall FER deficits in ASD. Compared to the TD group, children with ASD had the poorest performance in recognizing surprise and anger in comparison to happiness and sadness, and struggled with face–face matching, compared to voice-face and word-face combinations. Performance in the voice-face cross-modal recognition task was related to adaptive communication. These findings highlight the specific face processing deficit, and the relative merit of cross-modal integration in children with ASD.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)844-852
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Volume48
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Mar 2018

Keywords

  • Autism spectrum disorder
  • Cross-modal integration
  • Facial emotion recognition

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