Emotional recognition of children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder have difficulties recognizing emotional information, especially from facial expressions. The present study investigated facial expression recognition ability among 17 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and 26 typically developing children. Three facial expression tasks were used: the Eyes Task, the Morphed Faces Task, and the Movie Stills Task with and without faces. Children were asked to adapt emotional words for stimuli (eye stimuli and emotional scenes) or rate emotional intensity from facial expressions. Results showed that children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder had difficulties perceiving subtle fear, complex emotions, and using contextual information appropriately in the absence of faces. These findings suggest that difficulty in recognizing emotional information from not only facial expressions but also contextual cues could provide a basis for understanding to social deficits among children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder.