Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESNeural Correlates of Facial Affect Processing in Children and Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder
Section snippets
Subjects
Twelve males with ASD (mean age 12.2 Ā± 4.8 years, range 8ā23) and 12 TD males (mean age 11.8 Ā± 2.5 years, range 8ā16) 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 6.9ā19.8) and 16.3 Ā± 5.9 years (range 8.1ā22+) 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.