A Study Of Semantic Knowledge On Emotion Language In People With Williams Syndrome

Investigations on emotion in people with Williams syndrome(WS)are sparsely conducted.Relatively,incompleteness about the social cognitive ability in people with WS is known.Previous studies have dedicated to the recognition of emotion facial expressions and sentences with emotion prosody in people with WS.It was found that people with WS were not completely deficient but delayed in facial emotion recognition and emotion prosody understanding in the non-verbal domain.Few studies have focused on the emotion language knowledge in people with WS.It has been shown that people with WS were in the normal range in positive emotion language compared with normal controls.However,people with WS had delayed development in negative emotion language compared with mental age matched control group.People with WS were deviant in neutral emotion language.Based on these researches,studies on semantic knowledge on emotion language in people with WS are continued in this thesis.The purposes of this thesis were twofold: 1)to investigate their ability to comprehend basic emotions and 2)to test how people with WS classify different emotion valences.To reach the above purposes,two research questions were put forward: 1)What are the general profiles when people with WS comprehend basic emotions? 2)What are the general profiles of people with WS’ emotion classification in semantic knowledge?Two experiments were conducted in this thesis.In experiment one,comprehension on six basic emotions(happiness,sadness,anger,fear,disgust,surprise)in people with WS and two control groups was tested by narrating scenarios targeted in specific emotion.After listening to the basic emotional event carefully,the patients were needed to distinguish the emoticon corresponding to the emotional event.The correct percent and replacement percent of each target emotion were dependent variables.In experiment two,the emotion knowledge in people with WS and two control groups was investigated through their classification on emotions.The specific emotion words were used as prime words,including positive,neutral and negative emotions.These emotion words were used to prime three target emotions separately.After listening to prime and target words in order,the patients needed to judge whether these two words could elicit their same feeling.The correct response percent and reaction times were dependent variables.These results revealed that people with WS had certain patterns in basic emotion recognition.They were delayed in the recognition of “anger” and “surprise” emotion,and they were typical-like in “happiness”,“sadness”,“fear” and “disgust” emotions compared with healthy controls.Different from typically developing controls,people with WS were deviant in the replacement of “anger” and “fear” emotion.The performance in chronological age-matched group shows significant differences between students in Grade Six and college students in terms of basic emotion recognition,which indicates that the development of emotion knowledge is certainly affected by time change.In emotion priming experiment,people with WS were more sensitive to negative emotion valence words,which was the same as healthy control groups.However,people with WS had lower accuracy than healthy controls.In addition,they confused positive emotion valence words with neutral emotion valence words.These results showed that the emotion language knowledge in people with WS are different with healthy controls.This suggests that the mentalizing ability in people with WS is deficient indeed.Important contributions in this thesis are to investigate the emotion knowledge in basic emotion recognition and emotion classification in people with WS.Semantic knowledge in people with WS is discussed through emotion.It is clearly showed that there are deficits in the mentalizing ability in people with WS.