Motion-Capture Patterns of Voluntarily Mimicked Dynamic Facial Expressions in Children and Adolescents With and Without ASD.
Emily Zane, Zhaojun Yang, Lucia Pozzan and 3 others
PMID 30406914WHAT IT FOUND
Children with ASD copied positive and negative faces with similar overall facial movement, while children without ASD moved more for positive faces.
In the ASD group, high-intensity copies often peaked briefly rather than being sustained.
Key findings
01When copying positive versus negative emotional faces, children without ASD produced more overall facial movement for positive faces, but children with ASD did not show this difference.
02Both groups produced larger overall facial movement for high-intensity than low-intensity expressions, but in the ASD group high-intensity movement declined more steeply over the trial.
03The ASD group's average facial movement had a much larger spread than the group without ASD: group without ASD mean 2.1, standard deviation 2.0; ASD group mean 3.7, standard deviation 7.8.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 19 children with ASD and 18 without. It cannot support broad clinical conclusions. It tested only voluntarily copied facial expressions, not spontaneous expressions. It does not show how children use faces in everyday conversation. The researchers did not record video of the participants' faces. They could not confirm that the motion-capture differences were visible to other people. The analysis combined many facial markers into one overall movement measure. It cannot tell which parts of the face moved differently. The stimulus videos were not a clean set of six basic emotions. Some were excluded and some had ambiguous intensity labels. Some trials were excluded because markers were blocked. This left fewer than 18 recordings for some participants. The curve-shape findings were exploratory. This was the first study to use this motion-capture method with ASD. No treatment was tested. No clinical intervention can be inferred.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The supplied text does not state a funding source.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with ASD cannot produce facial expressions or that this pattern diagnoses ASD. The study measured only voluntarily copied expressions in 19 children with ASD and 18 without, did not test spontaneous expression, and did not show whether the motion-capture differences were visible to other people.