Visual search for basic emotional expressions in autism; impaired processing of anger, fear and sadness, but a typical happy face advantage
Section snippets
Participants
Three groups of right-handed males (N = 60) were recruited from local mainstream schools, specialist ASD units and branches of the National Autistic Society. All participants were assessed for verbal ability using the British Picture Vocabulary Scale-second edition (BPVS II; Dunn, Dunn, Whetton & Burley, 1997), and for non-verbal ability using Ravens coloured progressive matrices (RCPM; Raven, Raven, & Court, 1998). The experimental group comprised 20 males, all of whom had been clinically
Analysis of response times (RT)
RTs of correct response only were analysed. One participant from the ASD group responded incorrectly to every trial with fear as a target. This empty cell was replaced with the mean RT for the remaining 19 HFA/AS participants for this expression. Results are shown in Fig. 4.
ANOVA was carried out with target emotion (6 levels; anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) as the within-subjects factor, and group (3 levels; HFA/AS, TD CA and TD V/NV) as the between-subjects factor. This
Discussion
The present study investigated the abilities of children and adolescents with HFA/AS to search for a target face in a crowd based on six basic emotional expressions. Results showed a consistent pattern across HFA/AS and TD control groups such that identification of fear, anger and sadness target expressions was significantly slower than other emotions, with a corresponding reduction in accuracy for searches for fear and anger. In addition, identification of happy expressions showed the fastest
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Chris Ashwin and Peter Hobson for useful discussion, and Vanger, Hoenlinger and Haken for permission to use their face stimuli in this study. Thanks also goes to the participants with HFA/AS and the typically developing participants who have kindly participated in this study.
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