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Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
Published on: July 31, 2016
Brief Report: Is Impaired Classification of Subtle Facial Expressions in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Lydia R Whitaker1, Andrew Simpson2, Debi Roberson2
1Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK. lwhita@essex.ac.uk.
Abstract:
Impairments in recognizing subtle facial expressions, in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), may relate to difficulties in constructing prototypes of these expressions. Eighteen children with predominantly intellectual low-functioning ASD (LFA, IQ <80) and two control groups (mental and chronological age matched), were assessed for their ability to classify emotional faces, of high, medium and low intensities, as happy or angry. For anger, the LFA group made more errors for lower intensity expressions than the control groups, classifications did not differ for happiness. This is the first study to find that the LFA group made more across-valence errors than controls. These data are consistent with atypical facial expression processing in ASD being associated with differences in the structure of emotion categories.
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