Mimicry And Voluntary Imitation Of Facial Expressions In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD)is a kind of common developmental disorder,characterized by social communication disorders,including imitation and emotional perception disorders.In social interaction,imitation plays an extremely important role.By imitating others’ expressions and movements,people can reason others’ emotion and intention and judge their mental state,which can contribute to a smooth progress of social communication.For children,imitation is also a way of learning.Language,movement and expression of imitation can promote social learning and children’s social development.Children with autism spectrum disorders show deficits in their ability to imitate in the early development.Previous studies show that children with ASD have difficulty in imitating facial expressions,which affects their social interaction and social cognitive development.For the expression imitation problem of ASD,although previous studies divided imitation into different types,the results of these studies were inconsistent due to the defects of experimental design,and even the opposite conclusions were drawn.In our study,we chose 21 children with ASD and 22 traditional developmental children(TD)with matched age and IQ to explore their performances of facial expression imitation.We selected all 6 kinds of basic expressive photos and dynamic video to investigate the characteristics and differences of the two groups of children’s ability to imitate dynamic expressions.And this study devided imitation into mimicry and voluntary imitation.ASD group and TD group were compared in their performances of different imitation.Then,we used the expression video materials with higher ecological validity to explore the performances of the two groups in their ability to imitate dynamic expressions.Results showed that(a)Different with previous findings that ASD cannot spontaneously produce mimicry,we found that ASD group could produce both mimicry and voluntary imitation,but compared with TD group they still showed a low expression intensity;(b)ASD group was better at imitating dynamic expressions than static ones under voluntary imitation condition;(c)ASD group also exhibited a selective disorder of imitation in different expression types,(d)In our tasks,the expression intensity of children when they imitated static expressions voluntarily,as well as when they imitated fearful or sad expressions was related to their scores of ASSQ and AQ.