Vogel,
Shiri Pinsberg (3/08) Affective processing in children with autistic spectrum
disorders: the perception of threat (Philip Wong, Ph.D.; David Castro Blanco, Ph.D.;
Barry Ritzler, Ph.D.)
Research in the field of autism has
established that abnormal affective processing hinders the development of
social skills and communication. The exact nature of the emotion-processing
deficit, however, remains unclear. Previous studies exploring deficits in
children with autistic spectrum disorders have demonstrated abnormalities in
their use of emotional cues. To date, no research has explored the quality of
pre-attentive or pre-conscious affective processing. This study evaluated the
degree to which children with autistic spectrum disorders are attending to
emotional cues, particularly facial expressions. This experiment assessed 16
children with autistic spectrum disorders and 21 typically developing children
matched for verbal mental age on their performance in a pre-attentive visual
search paradigm. Participants were asked to determine whether a discrepant
object was placed in the field. The experimental design consisted of three
conditions: non-emotional stimuli; fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant
environmental stimuli; and facial stimuli of differing affective expressions.
Results indicate that both groups are able to respond pre-attentively to
perceptual stimuli. The two groups did not differ in their response to
non-emotional stimuli or non-facial threatening stimuli. However, in the faces
condition, the control group oriented their attention to the threatening targets.
When the discrepant target was an angry face, it was detected more quickly than
other kinds of affective expressions. The autistic spectrum disordered group
showed no difference in reaction time to type of face, indicating that they are
not preferentially orienting their attention to threatening faces in their
environments. Practical implications and directions for future research are
discussed.
