Generalised emotion recognition deficits in adults with ASD

Background: The debilitating social dysfunction integral to autism has been shown to relate to deficits in processing emotional information from human stimuli.  The majority of investigations into emotion processing in autism have used static images of emotional faces¹.  There is however increasing evidence to suggest that those with autism may also display deficits in other stimulus domains and sensory modalities^2,3.  

Objectives: We sought to address this by investigating basic emotion recognition across a range of stimulus types and across sensory modalities within a group of people with ASD, using tasks of comparable format.

Methods: 23 AS/HFA participants [mean age 32.5 years (s.d. 10.9 years), 16 males, 7 females] and 23 age and gender matched controls were recruited.  ASD participants had previously received a clinical diagnosis of an ASD and were further assessed using the ADOS and AQ.  There were three emotion label tasks; faces⁴, body movements⁵ and voices⁶.  Participants selected a text label from a choice of five to describe the emotion expressed in the stimulus.  Ten trials of happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust were presented in random order in the body movement and voices tasks.  Seven trials of each emotion were used in the faces task.  A t-test was used to assess differences in group performance for each task.
Results: The ASD group was significantly impaired in labelling emotion in each of the tasks.  In the Faces task; control accuracy = 92%, ASD =80%, t=3.06, p=0.003.  In the Body Movement  task; control accuracy =86%, ASD 71%, t=4.17, p<0.001.  In the Voice task; control accuracy =79%, ASD 61%, t=5.05, p<0.001.

Conclusions: Results are indicative of a cross-modal emotion processing deficit in autism. This implicates a neurobiological substrate that is part of an extended network involved in emotion processing, rather than structures specific to face processing.

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