Facial emotion recognition in high-functioning Autism - a new sensitive test of subtle deficits using dynamic stimuli

Background: The ability to recognise the emotional expressions of others forms an essential part of successful social functioning.  Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are characterised by social and communication impairment, yet evidence for deficits in the ability to recognise facial emotions is equivocal.  Some studies have shown individuals with ASD show deficits on interpreting emotions from facial expressions compared to the general population (e.g. Bolte & Poustka 2003).  Other studies, however, have reported that individuals with ASD do not show deficits in recognition of the basic emotions (e.g. Grossman et al. 2000).  This discrepancy in results may be due to differing methodologies.  Studies reporting no deficits have used stimuli that may be too simple (with associated ceiling effects), for example, ‘full-blown’ expressions.

Objectives: The study aims to test individuals with high-functioning Autism (HFA) on a new sensitive test of facial emotion recognition using varying intensities of expression (Montagne et al. 2007) in order to investigate subtle deficits in recognition of the basic emotions.

Methods: 10 males with HFA, diagnosed using research diagnostic criteria aged 15-17 are undergoing testing on the Emotion Recognition Test (Montagne et al. 2007) which uses dynamic stimuli of facial expressions in varying intensities of the 6 basic emotions (happy, sad, anger, fear, surprise, disgust).  10 age and IQ matched controls are undergoing testing on the ERT.  IQ was measured using the Leiter-R.

Results:   Data is currently being collected.  

Conclusions: Results will be discussed in relation to previous findings and theory.