Assessing Children’s Performance on the Facial Emotion Recognition Task with Familiar and Unfamiliar Faces: An Autism Study

Studies exploring facial emotion recognition (FER) abilities in autism spectrum
disorder (ASD) samples have yielded inconsistent results despite the widely-accepted
finding that an impairment in emotion recognition is a core component of ASD. The
current study aimed to determine if an FER task featuring both unfamiliar and familiar
faces would highlight additional group differences between ASD children and typically
developing (TD) children. We tested the two groups of 4- to 8-year-olds on this revised
task, and also compared their resting-state brain activity using electroencephalogram
(EEG) measurements. As hypothesized, the TD group had significantly higher overall
emotion recognition percent scores. In addition, there was a significant interaction effect
of group by familiarity, with the ASD group recognizing emotional expressions
significantly better in familiar faces than in unfamiliar ones. This finding may be related
to the preference of children with autism for people and situations which they are accustomed to. TD children did not demonstrate this pattern, as their recognition scores
were approximately the same for familiar faces and unfamiliar ones. No significant group
differences existed for EEG alpha power or EEG alpha asymmetry in frontal, central,
temporal, parietal, or occipital brain regions. Also, neither of these EEG measurements
were strongly correlated with the group FER performances. Further evidence is needed to
assess the association between neurophysiological measurements and behavioral
symptoms of ASD. The behavioral results of this study provide preliminary evidence that
an FER task featuring both familiar and unfamiliar expressions produces a more optimal
assessment of emotion recognition ability.