19428
Emotional Understanding and Perception in Cognitively Able 6-8 Years Old Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder
It is commonly assumed that emotion recognition and processing deficits are present in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) although DSM 5 criteria do not specify them directly. Failure of fundamental early emotion recognition skills would have profound consequences for a child’s social development. However, research on generalized or specific emotion recognition along the past 20 years has not come to a consensus whether basic emotion recognition is a fundamental difficulty in ASD. Some studies reported fear and other negative emotions recognition are most difficult for individuals with ASD. Most studies used either emotion labelling tasks or emotion matching tasks.
Objectives: The aim of the current study was to compare the understanding of four basic emotions, by assessing the coherence, content and the internal feeling these emotions provoked, in cognitively-able children with ASD and typical development.
Methods:
The study included 60 children, age ranged 6-8 years (M=72.0; SD=7.9 months). The ASD group consisted of 30 children (28 males, 2 females) diagnosed with ASD using standardized tests, all with IQ scores within the normal range (M=99.7; SD=12.1). The control group included pair-matched for age and sex, 30 typically developing children without documented developmental problems. Information on emotional understanding of four basic emotions (happy; fear; anger; sad) and the internal feeling they provoke was retrieved from the Autism Diagnosis Observation Scales (ADOS) test video-tapes for the ASD group, and from recorded interviews on this part of the ADOS for the control group. A coding system for rating the emotional questions responses was developed by the researchers and included codes for coherence, content and the internal feeling each emotion provoked.
Results:
The two groups were significantly different in the coherence of their responses to all the four basic emotions. Almost all the control group (96%) had coherent responses in comparison to only 70% of the ASD group (P<0.05 for ‘happy’, ‘fear’ and ‘anger’; P<0.01 for ‘sad’). Specifically, for the ‘fear’ emotion, 30% of the ASD group responded “none” (never experienced) in comparison to only 3% in the control group (P<0.01). Analyzing the content of the responses revealed the control group reported more interpersonal content than the ASD group only for the 'happy' and 'sad' emotions (P<0.05). The ASD group had significantly more response of 'none' in comparison to the control group for the “fear” (P<0.05) and “anger” (P<0.001) emotions. Of the responders, for the “fear” emotion both groups gave technical or related to an event response, and for the “anger” emotion, both gave an interpersonal content. The perception of the internal feeling was significantly different between the groups for the 'fear' (P<0.05), 'anger' (P<0.01) and ‘sad’ (P<0.05), but not for ‘happy’ emotion.
Conclusions:
Typically developing children in 6-8 years age-range fully conceptualize the nature of their basic emotions. In ASD understanding the nature of fear and sad emotions are not fully acquired and less interpersonal content is noted for happy and sad emotions. These specific findings can help in the diagnosis process of cognitively-able children with ASD.