Task Dependency When Evaluating Association Between Facial Emotion Recognition and Facial Emotion Expression in Children with ASD.
Andrea Trubanova Wieckowski, Deanna M Swain, A Lynn Abbott and 1 others
PMID 30173309WHAT IT FOUND
Children with ASD recognized emotions less accurately and made more atypical facial expressions than peers.
For children with ASD, recognition ability related to expression for named emotions, but not for human faces or scenes.
Key findings
01Children with ASD scored lower on facial emotion recognition than children without ASD.
02Facial expressions from children with ASD were rated more atypical than expressions from children without ASD across the photograph task and all three FEET levels.
03In children with ASD, higher facial emotion recognition was linked to better expression for named emotions, but linked to lower expression for human faces, a finding that did not remain significant after correction.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The groups were small: 20 children with ASD and 20 children without ASD. The ASD and TD groups differed in IQ, which could have influenced the results. The study did not test an intervention. FEET was used in one session to check expression detection. The expression tasks asked children to make labeled or prompted emotions, not spontaneous felt emotions. Some coding disagreements were resolved by a trainer who knew group assignment. The sample was high functioning and without co-occurring intellectual disability, so findings may not apply to lower functioning or nonverbal children.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that FEET or any facial expression training works. The children did not receive FEET as an intervention; it was used in one session to check that expressions could be detected. Also, the ASD and TD groups differed in IQ, and the sample was small.