Children with autism spectrum disorder produce more ambiguous and less socially meaningful facial expressions: an experimental study using random forest classifiers.
Charline Grossard, Arnaud Dapogny, David Cohen and 9 others
PMID 31956394WHAT IT FOUND
Children with autism produced facial expressions that judges rated as lower quality than those of typical children, especially for anger and sadness.
A computer classifier also found their expressions harder to identify, confusing anger with joy more often than in typical children.
Key findings
01Typically developing children received facial expression quality scores 1.44 times higher than children with autism.
02The computer classifier confused anger with joy more often in children with autism (18.62%) than in typical children (5.18%).
03Children produced better facial expressions when asked directly than when imitating an avatar, and sadness was the most difficult emotion.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The autism group was smaller than the typical group (36 versus 157 children). The judges knew the diagnosis and were part of the research team. The tasks were laboratory requests and avatar imitation, not natural social interactions. Typical children did not have IQ measured, so IQ could not be compared across groups. The autism group had mean IQ 92.5, slightly below average, which may have exaggerated group differences. Human judges rated whole videos, but the classifier used only the peak frame. Video length differed, and shorter videos tended to be rated better, though this was not significant. Social skills were not measured, even though facial expressiveness and social skills are related.
Declared interests
The supplied text reports funding by Agence Nationale pour la Recherche and does not give an author conflict-of-interest statement.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with autism cannot produce facial expressions. They completed the tasks with some success, and the study found lower recognisability and credibility, not absence of expression.