Facial expression recognition as a candidate marker for autism spectrum disorder: how frequent and severe are deficits?
E Loth, L Garrido, J Ahmad and 3 others
PMID 29423133WHAT IT FOUND
On a brief film-based emotion task, 63% of high-functioning people with ASD showed severe deficits, but 15.3% performed within the control range.
Key findings
01On the Films Expression Task, the ASD group identified 70.8% of briefly shown expressions, versus 87.5% in the control group, with an effect size of 1.62.
0263% of participants with ASD scored more than 2 SDs below the control mean, while 15.3% scored within the control range.
03The ASD group also responded more slowly, averaging 1459 ms across all trials versus 878 ms for controls.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study compared groups and did not test whether the task predicts real-life communication or treatment response. The sample was restricted to normal-range IQ, so findings may not apply to people with ASD and intellectual disability. One typically developing participant more than 4 SDs below the control mean was excluded. The AQ analysis used only 53 participants, and within-group correlations were not significant. The task relied on English emotion words, and some participants were not native English speakers. The test-retest sample was only 28 and included four people from an autism support group. The paper says the test may be a stratification marker, not a proven diagnostic marker.
Declared interests
Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Innovative Medicines Initiative. The supplied text does not report a company that sells the treatment funding, designing, or writing the study.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use this task as a stand-alone diagnostic test or assume every person with ASD has expression recognition deficits. In this sample, 15.3% of people with ASD performed within the control range, and the paper says the test still needs further validation as a stratification marker.