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Neural Correlates of Facial Affect Processing in Children and Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder

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ABSTRACT

Objective

To examine the neural basis of impairments in interpreting facial emotions in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

Method

Twelve children and adolescents with ASD and 12 typically developing (TD) controls matched faces by emotion and assigned a label to facial expressions while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Results

Both groups engaged similar neural networks during facial emotion processing, including activity in the fusiform gyrus (FG) and prefrontal cortex. However, between-group analyses in regions of interest revealed that when matching facial expressions, the ASD group showed significantly less activity than the TD group in the FG, but reliably greater activity in the precuneus. During the labeling of facial emotions, no between-group differences were observed at the behavioral or neural level. Furthermore, activity in the amygdala was moderated by task demands in the TD group but not in the ASD group.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that children and adolescents with ASD in part recruit different neural networks and rely on different strategies when processing facial emotions. High-functioning individuals with ASD may be relatively unimpaired in the cognitive assessment of basic emotions, yet still show differences in the automatic processing of facial expressions.

Section snippets

Subjects

Twelve males with ASD (mean age 12.2 Ā± 4.8 years, range 8ā€“23) and 12 TD males (mean age 11.8 Ā± 2.5 years, range 8ā€“16) participated in the study. Mean nonverbal language ages, as assessed by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Third Edition (PPVT-III) (Dunn and Dunn, 1997), were 12.1 Ā± 4.6 years (range 6.9ā€“19.8) and 16.3 Ā± 5.9 years (range 8.1ā€“22+) for the ASD and TD groups, respectively. Neither mean chronological age nor language age was significantly different between groups. Although the ASD

Behavioral Performance

Planned comparisons revealed that the two groups did not differ reliably in reaction time on any of the tasks or in accuracy during the label condition or control condition. Children with ASD were marginally less accurate than TD children when matching faces by emotion (mean = 94.8 Ā± 7.2% and 84.8 Ā± 14.8% correct for the TD and ASD groups, respectively; F1,19 = 3.67, p = .07); however, neither response time nor accuracy was significantly correlated with brain activity in ROIs in either group.

DISCUSSION

This study is the first to examine the neural basis of impairments in processing facial emotions in children and adolescents with ASD. Despite notable similarities in activation profiles for children with ASD and children with typical development, some group differences in brain activation patterns during facial emotion processing emerged. Two of these differences involved regions where abnormalities have been reported in adults with ASD, namely the FG and the amygdala (Baron-Cohen et al., 1999a

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    This work was supported by the Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization, the Pierson-Lovelace Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Tamkin Foundation, the Jennifer Jones-Simon Foundation, the Northstar Fund, and NIH grant PO1-35470 .

    The authors thank the participants and their parents and gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Caitlin Beck, Christina Burger, Aida Cristina Fernandez, Cindy Huang, Alma Lopez Singh, Corina Williams McGovern, and Olivia Pillado.

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