Attentional Bias To Emotional Face In Children With High-Functioning Autism

Attentional bias to emotional faces is a protective adaptation mechanism of human.The ability to attend to emotional faces,is critical for building many aspects of social and emotional functioning,guiding adaptive behaviors across development,associating with a number of psychological and externalizing problems.Social communication and interaction disorders is one of the core disorders of Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD).Attention to social information helps to explain their mechanism of social impairment,which has become the focus and hotspot of current special education,psychology,and cognitive neuroscience.Previous studies have found that the social function and symptom of ASD individuals are closely related to emotional faces attentional bias.The research not only helps to reveal the mechanism of social impairment,but also can guide ASD individuals to form appropriate emotional attentional bias,and improve their social ability.However,previous studies mostly explored the attentional bias of emotional faces in individuals with ASD through button response.The reliability of these research is limited and the results are inconsistent.In addition,previous studies mostly explored the control processing of attentional bias to emotional faces,ignoring the exploration of the automatic processing.Therefore,it is impossible to reveal the time course and characteristics of its attentional bias,and the mechanism of attentional bias to emotional faces.To address these limitations,we designed three studies to progressively explore the existence,characteristics and mechanisms of attentional bias to emotional faces in high-functioning autism spectrum disorder(HFA)children.Study 1 investigated whether there is an attentional bias for emotional faces in HFA children,including a meta-analysis and an eye-tracking experiment.Based on the results of previous keypressing tasks,the meta-analysis study found that individuals with autism do have an attentional bias towards threatening emotional faces.Experiment 1 used eye-tracking technology combined with modified dot probe paradigm to re-verify the attentional bias.Results showed that typical children showed attentional bias to both threatening and happy faces,while HFA children only showed attentional bias to threatening emotional faces.Study 1 confirmed the presence of threatening emotional faces attentional bias in children with HFA,but when and what characteristics this attentional bias occurs is unclear.Study 2 uses eye tracking technology to analyze the above problems through three experiments(Experiments 2a&b-3).Experiment 2a and 2b analyze the occurrence time and stage characteristics of attentional bias to emotional faces,and Experiment 3explores its content characteristics.The results showed that HFA children and typical children showed the same characteristics.In terms of occurrence time,the attentional bias of emotional faces in the two groups occurred in the control processing stage;in stage characteristics,they showed the characteristics from attentional vigilance to difficulty in disengagement;in content,typical children showed attentional bias towards faces with all emotions(negative and positive),but HFA children only showed attentional bias towards faces with negative emotions.From studies 1 and 2,it is not yet able to conclude which factors contribute to their attentional bias towards emotional faces.Study 3 used eye-tracking technology to explore the mechanism of attentional bias to emotional faces through three experiments(Experiments 4a&b-5).Experiment 4a and 4b analyzed the effects of valence and arousal factors;Experiment 5 analyzed the effect of task correlation factors.The results showed that there were both similarities and differences in the two group.The common feature is that the relationship between the task goal and emotion will promote the attentional bias to emotional faces in the two groups of children;the difference is that arousal significantly affects typical children,but valence is important for HFA children.To sum up,the main conclusion of this research is that there are both commonalities and differences among HFA children and typical children in the attentional biases to emotional face.The common points are as follows.1)Both group children show a negative emotional face attentional bias.2)Their emotional face attentional bias occurs in the control processing stage,and the characteristic of attentional bias changes from attentional vigilance to difficulty in disengagement.3)Both groups of children’s emotional faces attentional bias were affected by task goals.The differences are as follows.1)Typical children showed attentional bias to all emotional(negative and positive)faces,but HFA children only showed attentional bias to negative emotional faces.2)To typical children,the factor underlying this attentional bias is arousal.But valence is important to HFA children.Our research verified that HFA children do show attentional bias to negative emotional faces.Second,the abnormally happy faces attentional bias in HFA children supports social motivation theory.Thirdly,this study preliminarily explored the characteristics and mechanism of attentional bias to emotional faces of HFA individuals,which provides a methodology and theoretical basis for future research,and also has important guiding value for the development of social functions in children with HFA.Finally,the results of typical children in our research supplemented childhood evidence for the attentional bias to emotional faces,which enriches people’s acknowledge about attention bias to emotion and has high value in social education.