Affect Recognition Skills across Four Nonverbal Channels in Children with Autism-Spectrum Disorders and Their Typically-Developing Peers

Background: We currently have an incomplete understanding of the social-emotional processing impairments that give rise to social disability among children with autism-spectrum disorders (ASDs). Affect recognition, or the ability to infer others’ emotions from nonverbal cues, is an important contributor to social success and has been proposed as one of the deficits in ASD. Most studies have examined children’s ability to infer emotions from photographs of facial expressions. Although some studies find that children with ASDs have impaired affect recognition skills, other studies find no differences between children with ASDs and their typically-developing peers.Objectives: The objective of this study is to compare the ability of children with ASDs to recognize others’ emotions from four nonverbal channels (facial expression, tone of voice, posture, and gait) to that of their typically-developing peers. We hypothesize that averaged across nonverbal behavioral channels (faces, voices, posture, and gait), compared to their typically-developing peers, children with ASDs will have difficulty inferring others’ emotions. Methods: A total of 160 typically-developing children and 20 children with ASDs (ages 5 to 14 years) completed multiple tests of affect recognition, spanning four nonverbal channels. Using a regression analysis of the typically-developing sample, we estimated expected means at each age and the expected variability around those regression estimates. The degree of deviation (SD) from that expected mean was calculated for each child with an ASD. Results: Children with ASDs consistently score lower on affect recognition measures skills than their typically-developing age-mates. Conclusions:  The data provide a clear and consistent picture that compared to a large sample of typically-developing children, children with ASDs have mild to moderate nonverbal accuracy deficits across a range of nonverbal behaviors. These data add to our understanding of social-emotional processing impairments. Future studies may investigate the application of this information to the development of new assessment and treatment measures.