1.4 SOCIAL INFORMATION PROCESSING IN AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

Objectives: Social information processing encompasses many behaviors, including emotion recognition. For normal social interactions and effective communication, the ability to collect relevant information from faces and correctly interpret facial expressions in real time is crucial. Common errors include the misinterpretation of anger and disgust or fear and surprise. This study examined differences in identification of facial expressions of individuals with and without ASD. Methods: Two groups of male participants (ages 8-18 years) were recruited to perform the dynamic affect recognition evaluation (DARE; affects: happy, sad, anger, fear, surprise, disgust). Twenty-three individuals with ASD (ages 12.65 ± ≥ 2.06 years) and 18 individuals without ASD (ages 11.83 ± ≥ 2.41 years) completed the study. Results: To date, in the sample group of patients with ASD, there was a significant difference in the identification of happy and surprise versus anger, disgust, and fear. Happy (anger: P - 0.003; disgust: P < 0.001; fear: P - 0.003) and surprise (anger: P - 0.005; disgust: P < 0.001; fear: P - 0.005) were identified correctly more often than anger, disgust, and fear. ANOVA showed that the group with ASD made significantly less fear/surprise (P - 0.025) errors, and the control group made significantly fewer anger/disgust (P - 0.038) errors. In addition, eye-tracking data on how participants viewed each face were collected. Results from the eye-tracking analysis will be evaluated to examine correlations with accuracy in task performance. Conclusions: When examining performance on the DARE, we found that children and adolescents with ASD were better able to identify several negative affective emotions better than positive ones. These finding may allude to differences in social information processing, specifically emotion recognition. Further understanding of the variation in emotion processing among individuals with and without ASD may prove beneficial in the design of effective and personalized interventions.