Emotion Recognition in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Conditions: Cross Cultural Findings

Background: Children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) have emotion recognition deficits when tested in different expression modalities (face, voice, body). However, these findings usually focus on a narrow range of emotions, using one or two expression modalities. In addition, cultural similarities and differences in emotion recognition patterns in children with ASC have not been explored before.  

Objectives:  To compare the similarities and differences in the recognition of 18 emotions by children with ASC and typically developing (TD) controls across three cultures: Israel, Britain, and Sweden.

Methods:  In each of the three countries, 20 children with high-functioning ASC, aged 5-9 were compared to 20 TD children, matched on age, sex, and IQ. Children were tested using 4 tasks, examining recognition from voice recordings, videos of facial and bodily expressions, and emotional video scenarios including all modalities in context. An established emotion recognition task, the Frankfurt Test of Facial Affect Recognition (FEFA-2), was used as an external validity criterion.

Results:  Children with ASC scored lower than TD controls on all tasks. Tasks strongly correlated with each other, positively correlated with the FEFA-2, and negatively correlated with autism symptomatology. Some cross cultural differences were found, mostly in the vocal domain, but there was considerable cross-cultural universality of these deficits

Conclusions: This study demonstrates the clinically significant multi-modal deficits in interpreting emotional cues in children with ASC. Cross-cultural research has the potential to reveal both autism-specific universal deficits, and the role that specific cultures play in the subtle differences in how empathy operates in different countries.