Investigating the Role of Emotion Perception in the Communication Skills of Individuals on the Autism Spectrum

Background: Research has shown that children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have difficulty communicating with others effectively, often to a degree that is unexpected given their level of cognitive functioning. Moreover, emotion perception is widely known to be an area of weakness for these individuals, specifically in identifying emotions of others. Despite the great deal of research investigating both emotion perception and adaptive behaviors such as communication skills, it remains unclear exactly how these two constructs are related with regard to ASD.

Objectives: To assess the relationship between emotion perception abilities and communication skills in children and adolescents on the autism spectrum compared to typically developing individuals (TD). In order to evaluate the mediational hypothesis and account for the non-normality of the sampling distribution, bootstrapping in conjunction with OLS regression was utilized (Preacher & Hayes 2008). Estimates of the indirect effect were obtained with bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals.

Methods: 19 children and adolescents with ASD (4 males; mean age = 13.07 years, SD=3.73) and 11 typically-developing controls (2 males; mean age = 12.46 years, SD=3.29) participated as part of a larger study. All subjects were administered the DANVA-2 as a measure of emotion perception ability and completed the four subtests: Adult and Child Paralanguage, Adult and Child Faces. Each subtest consists of 24 faces or voices, with answer choices of happy, sad, angry or fearful. Additionally, the parent/guardian of each participant completed the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales – Second Edition (VABS-II) to assess participants’ levels of adaptive functioning; the Communication domain score was used in this study. IQ was estimated using the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence.

Results: Individuals with ASD made significantly more errors in emotion perception (M = 16.45, SD=3.80) than did TD individuals (M = 24.95, SD=10.59; F(30)=7.132, p=.003). Additionally, and as expected, the communication skills of individuals with ASD were reported to be significantly lower (SS78.74) than that of TD individuals (SS=103.15; F(30)=.415, p<.001). The total effect of diagnostic group on communication skills was -20.63, SE=5.63, p=.001 when controlling for IQ. The total indirect effect through the mediator, emotion perception ability, has a point estimate of 4.59 and a 95% Bca bootstrap CI of .8475 to 14.70. That the CI for this indirect effect did not overlap with zero indicates the indirect effect is significantly different from zero at p<.05.

Conclusions: Based on the direction of these results, it appears that, compared to TD individuals, as the emotion perception abilities of ASD individuals decreased (i.e. more errors), their level of communication skills became significantly more impaired. This finding indicates that there may be an important relationship between emotion perception ability and communication skills in individuals with ASD. Further exploration and application of this relationship could facilitate novel emotion perception-focused interventions for advancing the communication skills of individuals on the autism spectrum.