Brief report: perception and lateralization of spoken emotion by youths with high-functioning forms of autism

The perception and the cerebral lateralization of spoken emotions were investigated in children and adolescents with high-functioning forms of autism (HFFA), and age-matched typically developing controls (TDC). A dichotic listening task using nonsense passages was used to investigate the recognition of four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and neutrality. The participants with HFFA did not differ significantly in overall performance from the TDC, suggesting that the pervasive difficulty in processing emotions is not uniformly present in emotions expressed verbally. Both groups demonstrated a left-ear effect for the perception of emotion in nonsense passages, consistent with overall right-hemisphere superiority for this function.