Facial expression recognition in Williams syndrome.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Genetics

Background:

• Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with enhanced social drive and linguistic skills, particularly with emotional language.
• Individuals with WS typically exhibit superior face recognition abilities.
• Deficits in processing emotional expressions are often noted in neurodevelopmental disorders.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate emotional expression perception in individuals with Williams syndrome.
• To compare the performance of individuals with WS on an emotional expression test with age-matched and mental age-matched controls.
• To explore the relationship between emotional expression recognition, IQ, and age in WS.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the Animated Full Facial Expression Comprehension Test (AFFECT) to assess emotional expression perception.
• Compared participants with WS to chronological age-matched controls and mental age-matched controls.
• Correlated performance on AFFECT and the Benton face recognition test with age and IQ.

Main Results:

• Expression recognition in individuals with WS was poorer than in chronological age-matched controls.
• Performance on AFFECT was comparable between individuals with WS and mental age-matched controls.
• Expression recognition performance in WS correlated with IQ, not age, unlike face recognition which correlated with age.

Conclusions:

• Individuals with WS may employ different processing strategies for emotional expressions compared to controls.
• Impaired emotional expression recognition in WS may stem from reduced configural processing abilities.
• These configural deficits might be linked to early abnormal neuronal development in Williams syndrome.