Basic Emotion Recognition Deficiencies Of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder:Weak Subjective Experienced Or Inability To Express?

Emotion recognition deficiency is one of the manifestations of social communication deficiency in children with autism spectrum disorders.However,it is not clear whether it is due to weak subjective experienced arousal during emotional processing,or whether the subjective emotional experienced arousal is normal but cannot express their feeling of emotion.Previous studies have confirmed that abnormal autonomic physiological response is one of the possible causes of emotional recognition deficits in children with autism spectrum disorders.Relevant studies also show that most children with autism spectrum disorders have alexithymia(inability to express),and abnormalities of subjective experienced arousal during emotional processing.However,there is no direct evidence to prove how they impact on emotional recognition of children with autism spectrum disorders.Therefore,this study intends to explore the influence of subjective experienced arousal(subjective emotional experience)and alexithymia(inability to express emotion)on basic emotional recognition(emotional valence judgment)of autistic spectrum disorder children during emotional perception.The study consisted of two experiments.In experiment 1,social scenes and non-social scenes were used as experimental materials and Toronto Alexithymia Scale(TAS-20)was employed to test the alexithymia degree of participants to explore the influence of subjective experienced arousal and alexithymia on autistic children ‘s emotional perception of social and non-social scenes.In experiment 2,facial expressions were used as experimental materials to figure out the effects of subjective experienced arousal and alexithymia on emotional perception of facial expressions in children with autism spectrum disorders.The results show that:(1)both of social/non-social scenes and facial expression recognition(valence judgment)of all participants could be significant predicted by the subjective experienced arousal and alexithymia.However,the predictive effects were different between subjective experienced arousal and alexithymia.The influence of alexithymia on both social scenes and facial expression recognition were slightly greater than subjective arousal,while the impact of subjective experienced arousal on non-social information recognition were slightly greater than alexithymia;(2)The accuracy of emotion recognition of autistic spectrum disorder children in both social/non-social scenes and facial expression was significantly lower than that of typical developing children,whereas the accuracy of positive and negative emotion recognition was higher than that of neutral emotion;(3)the subjective experienced arousal of children with autism spectrum disorders was lower than typical developing children both during the processing of social/non-social scenes or facial expression,but the subjective experienced arousal of children with autism spectrum disorders on negative and positive emotions was significantly higher than that of neutral emotions;(4)most of children with autism spectrum disorders suffered from alexithymia and their TAS-20 scores is significantly higher than typical developmental children.Based on all the results above,it can be considered that the weak subjective emotion experience(subjective experienced arousal)and the inability of expressing their feelings(alexithymia)during emotional stimulus processing in children with autism spectrum disorders are potential causes of their basic emotional recognition defects.Follow-up emotional recognition intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders should focus on emotional experience and feeling expressing.