Young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder look differently at positive versus negative emotional faces

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Abstract

One of the core issues in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is problematic social interaction, which for an important part is reflected by poor processing of emotional information. Typically, adults show specific viewing patterns while scanning positive and negative emotional expressions in faces. In this study, we investigated whether the same pattern is present in a group of 3- to 6-year-old children with ASD and a 5-year-old control group. We found that although the group with ASD looked less at feature areas of the face (eye, mouth, nose) than the control group, both the children with ASD and the normally developing children displayed differential scanning patterns for faces displaying positive and negative emotions. Specifically, we found increased scanning of the eye region when looking at faces displaying negative emotions. This study shows that, although young children with ASD exhibit abnormal face scanning patterns, they do exhibit differential viewing strategies while scanning positive and negative facial expressions.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 13 children with ASD (11 boys and 2 girls, mean age 62 months, S.D. = 10.7, 1 with Asperger Syndrome, 4 with PDD-NOS and 8 with Autistic Disorder), and 14 control children (10 boys and 4 girls, mean age 59.2 months, S.D. = 1.3) participated in the study. The ADI-R scores for the Social Impairment and Communication Impairment scales can be found in Table 1 (for 3 of the participants no ADI-R test data were available). To be able to include both non-speakers and speakers with ASD in the

General group differences

First, the overall differences between the ASD group and the control group with reference to their looking behavior towards the emotional faces were analyzed. The total looking time was much higher in the control group (M = 7.25 s, S.E. = 0.36) than in the group with ASD (M = 5.12 s, S.E. = 0.67; t(24) = 2.92, p < .01, effect size r = .51, two-sided). Next, the locations of the fixations were examined. Fig. 1 shows the percentage of fixations on the eye, nose and mouth area for positive and negative emotions.

Discussion

We found several differences in face scanning patterns between the group with ASD and controls. First, and not surprisingly, the control group looked more at the screen during testing. Second, the group with ASD looked less at the feature areas (eyes, nose, mouth) compared to the rest of the screen, which is in accord with various earlier studies (e.g., Klin et al., 2002; Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007; Pelphrey et al., 2002). Contrary to what Klin et al. (2002) found for adolescents

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants to CvH from the Tercentennial Fund of the Bank of Sweden (J2004-0511) and European Union (EU15636: TACT). TdW was funded by a personal grant from the Niels Stensen Foundation. We would like to thank all families who took part in the study, the childcare centers that were involved, and Dorota Stasiewicz who recruited the participants.

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