Emotion Recognition in Boy and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have demonstrated impairments in emotion recognition. Most of this research has only been done with males and gender as a variable has not been studied. Gender is an important factor in emotion recognition because research has implicated a female advantage. Objectives: To examine emotion recognition skills in children with ASD and to determine if there are differences in ability for boys with ASD compared to girls with ASD. Methods: Twenty boys and 20 girls with ASD (ages 6-12 years) were required to choose between the options of happy, scared, angry, or fearful when presented either with a picture of a child displaying an emotion or a recording of a child’s voice with emotion. For group results, the performances of the 40 children with ASD were compared to the age-matched normative sample. Results: As a group, the boys and girls with ASD were more impaired on total scores of both modes of emotion recognition when compared to the normative sample. On the measure of emotion recognition of faces, the ASD group (M = 7.40) made significantly more errors than their age-matched comparison group (M = 4.39; F(78) = 13.40, p < .001). On the measure of emotion recognition in voice, the ASD group (M = 8.80) also made significantly more errors than their age-matched comparison group (M = 6.36; F(78) = 8.01, p < .01). Boys (M = .22) had significantly more difficulty recognizing sadness as a facial expression than the girls (M = .12;  F(38) = 4.37, p < .05). Conclusions: Children with ASD demonstrate impairments in recognizing affect in voice and on faces. In particular, boys with ASD demonstrate more impairment in recognizing sad faces than girls with ASD.