An Experiment Study On The Facial Expression Recognition In Children With Autistic Spectrum Disorders

The facial expression recognition is an important part of social cognition. It facilitates people’s feedback in a social interaction through the procedure from sensing and recognizing others’facial expressions to understanding the transmitted affect and intention. The facial expression recognition of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is now a popular topic in the disciplinary fields like special education, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and neuroscience. It even became a controversial issue when recently the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) incorporated facial expressions as one of the diagnostic criteria for ASD. This research employed a systematic study on facial expression recognition of children with ASD for the purpose of:(1) offering an objective evaluation on autistic children’s capability to recognize facial expressions;(2) exploring internally the information processing progress of facial expression recognition of children with ASD;(3) providing experimental evidence to interventions on facial expression recognition of children with ASD.There are five parts in the paper:Chapter One is the literature review. Topics elaborated in this part include the concept of facial expression, the concept of facial expression identification, the taxonomy of facial expression recognition, the research paradigm of facial expression recognition, the research background, and research problems.Chapter Two put forward the research purposes, contents, design, research priorities and potential difficulties.Chapter Three details the experimental study, in which the researcher employs two major aspects (behavioral and ERP) to explore the characteristics of autistic children’s facial expression recognition.In Experiment1, a facial expression labeling experiment was implemented to explore whether children with ASD have their facial expression schemata, and to find the differences between facial expression schemata of children with ASD and those of children with intellectual disability (ID). The result revealed a superiority effect when children with ASD recognize anger facial expressions, and also showed that children with ASD had a preference on strong facial expressions, and children with intellectual disability, on the contrary, prefer weak facial expressions.In Experiment2, a facial expression intensity distinguishing task was given to participants to compare the ability to assess intensity of facial expression as well as the stability of facial expression schemata between children with ASD and children with ID. However, the task here was relatively simple and less disturbing. Therefore more challenging tasks were designed in Experiment3and Experiment5to see if the increasing difficulty would change the facial expression recognition of children with ASD.In Experiment3, there was an implicit expression recognition task. With a more difficult task, it further explored the ability of children with ASD to recognize implicit expression, as well as interference factors that affect implicit expression recognition. This part tested the repeatability of results in Experiment1through an implicit design.In Experiment4, the facial expressions rendering speed was controlled and put into three conditions in the task as to compare facial expression recognition of children with ASD and of children with ID in three different experimental settings. It was found that with the rendering speed increasing, the reaction time and accuracy of children with ASD altered in a separated way. The accuracy formed a V curve, but the anger-superiority effect remains.In Experiment5, two faces were presented in either a pseudo-animation or a pseudo-random way, as representation of a facial identification and a facial expression condition, to compare the facial expression matching performance of children with ASD and children with ID. It was found that those two groups of children had different performances on the task. Children with ASD performed better when matching anger faces, and children with ID had better performance when matching neutral faces.In Experiments6, we implemented an ERP experiment which provided evidence to support the f the anger-superiority effect we found in the previous cognitive experiments. Moreover, the ERP experiment offered a neurobiological support to this finding by revealing the separated spatial and temporal patterns in recognizing happiness and anger.Chapter Four gave a comprehensive analysis to the results Five cognition models were elaborated to support the analysis, and they are:(1) the label cognitive processing model,(2) rules experience competition,(3) memory to recognize faces space model,(4) the model of resource allocation strategies,(5) anchor recognition matching model. Based on these models, the comprehensive analysis to results of the previous studies was given to explore the performance on facial expression recognition of children with ASD.Chapter Five is mainly about summary and outlook. It summarized the six findings in this research, and then proposed a comprehensive facial expression recognition model for children with ASD. Moreover, Enlightenment of the intervention and education for Children with ASD and the limitations of this research were discussed here. And future research about facial expression recognition of children with ASD was recommended to be larger sized, more cooperative, and more systematic.