Complex Emotional Recognition In Children With Autism Summary

NAME
Shauna Odum
DATE OF SUBMISSION
March 30, 2017
JOURNAL REFERENCE
Fridenson-Hayo, S., Berggren, S., Lassalle, A., Tal, S., Pigat, D., Bölte, S., . . . Golan, O. (2016).
Basic and complex emotion recognition in children with autism: cross-cultural findings. Molecular Autism, 7(1). doi:10.1186/s13229-016-0113-9
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS This study aimed to compare the recognition of both complex and basic emotions in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and in typically developing (TD) children. This study was completed in three different countries - Israel, Great Britain, and Sweden - to also compare the recognition of these emotions cross-culturally. ASD is a disorder in which people have social challenges, including
communication challenges. These communication challenges often include a difficulty recognizing emotions both in others, and in themselves. For this study, the children were given an Emotion Recognition Battery assembled by the conductors of the study. This battery consisted of voice recordings, videos of facial and bodily expressions, and video scenarios that combined these three tests. The battery was designed to test for recognition of six basic, and 12 complex emotions. The six basic emotions tested for were: happy, sad, afraid, angry, disgusted, and surprised. The complex emotions that were tested for were: interested, bored, excited, worried, disappointed, frustrated, proud, ashamed, kind, unfriendly, joking, and hurt. The audio clips consisted of neutral sentences, such as “what’s all this?”, that were spoken to convey the intended emotion, and were recorded in the native language of the country the battery was administered. In the clips chosen to identify emotions by body language, the faces of the actors were masked to prevent the subjects from relying on facial expressions. In the combined clips, the soundtrack of the show was muffled, so only words spoken by the actors could be understood. In each of these tests, participants had to correctly identify which emotion was being portrayed from four options presented to them. Each test had only one correct answer, and three foils. One foil was always the opposite of the correct emotion, and the other two foils were similar to the correct option. The body language task included only 24 items, with a maximum score of a 24. This task only tested for the six basic emotions, and the following six complex emotions: proud, worried, excited, disappointed, frustrated, and bored. To ensure an accurate result, each emotion tested was represented by two different items. In the three other tasks (face, voice, and combination), there were 36 clips per task, with a maximum score of 36 in each distinct task. Each emotion was also represented by two clips in these tasks. Each child was met anywhere from one to three times to complete the battery.
Location at which the battery was administered differed between the countries in which the battery took place. In Britain, some meetings took place at the participant’s home, and others took place at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge. In Israel, all of the meetings occurred at the participant’s home, while all meetings in Sweden occurred at the clinical research department KIND. All children took the battery individually, with the instructions, questions, and possible answers all read aloud to the children. If the children did not understand one of the possible answers, they were given a sheet explaining this emotion to the participant. The participants could take as long as they liked to answer the question, but the clip was only played once. The battery in its entirety took anywhere from 1.5 to 2.4 hours, including
breaks. At the conclusion of this study, it was discovered that broadly, participants with ASD struggled to recognize both complex and basic emotions, more than their TD counterparts. In both Israel and Britain, the variance between the scores of participants with ASD and TD participants were very similar in both the basic and complex emotions. However, in Sweden the scores were more complicated. In the face and voice tasks testing basic emotions, TD and ASD participants had the same average score. For the remaining tests and all complex tests, however, the scores were as predicted, with the TD participants scoring higher than their counterparts with ASD. As expected, as participants ages increased, their scores increased as well.

DISCUSSION This study proved the common belief that children with ASD have more difficulty distinguishing emotions than their TD peers do.
This study went even further than many in the past have, showing that these deficiencies exist cross-culturally. Information found in this study can help in future research into ASD, and potentially even helping assist people with ASD to acclimate well to their surroundings. Autism has always been a fascinating subject to me, mainly due to the fact that I know many people living with both minor and more major types of ASD. This study helped to show me some of the ways that people with ASD see the world in a different way. One limitation of this study is that it was only conducted in western countries. This means that there could be a difference between TD people and people with ASD in countries that are less developed. This study also did not have many female participants, due to the low number of females that are diagnosed with ASD. The battery was also administered in slightly different ways from one site to the next. For example, many participants in Israel and Britain were given the battery at their homes, while others took the battery in a lab setting. A standardized testing environment was maintained as well as possible, so it is unlikely that this had an effect on the scores of participants. However, it is still possible that this could have slightly skewed the
results.