From facial emotional recognition abilities to emotional attribution: a study in Down syndrome

Facial expression processing and the attribution of facial emotions to a context were investigated in adults with Down syndrome (DS) in two experiments. Their performances were compared with those of a child control group matched for receptive vocabulary. The ability to process faces without emotional content was controlled for, and no differences appeared between the two groups. Specific impairments were found in the DS group according to the task modalities and the type of facial emotional expressions. In the emotion matching condition, the DS adults showed overall difficulties whereas in the identification and recognition conditions they were particularly impaired when processing the neutral expression. In the emotion attribution task, they exhibited difficulties with the sad expression only and the analysis of their error pattern revealed that they rarely selected this expression throughout the task. The sad emotion was the only one that showed a significant relationship with the facial expression processing tasks.