A Study On Emotional Perceptual Characteristics Of Social Orienting To Children With Autism In Dynamic Situation

Social orienting is a natural tendency for children to respond to social cues and is the basis for perceiving emotions in infants and young children.Whether children with autism have impairments in social orienting and whether there are unique features of emotion perception remains controversial.Current research has focused more on emotion perception features in isolated,static facial expressions,while ignoring other nonverbal expressions such as body expressions.Thus,this study aims to focus on the perceptual characteristics of children with autism’s social orienting towards different object attributes,emotion types,external expressions of emotions,and facial expression features in a dynamic situation with a high ecological nature through an eye-movement experiment,and to investigate the way children with autism process facial expressions.This study consisted of three experiments in which 21 children with autism and 21 ordinary children matched for physical age and reasoning level were recruited.Experiment 1 found that the selection characteristics of children with autism for social stimuli in dynamic situations did not differ significantly from those of ordinary children Experiment 2 added the three basic emotions of cheerfulness,anger and sadness and examined the social orientation characteristics of children with autism to social stimuli on the three external manifestations of emotions: overall expressions,body expressions and facial expressions,and found that children with autism differed from ordinary children in first gaze duration and other indicators reflecting priority orienting regions,such as first gaze duration.Experiment 3 explored the effect of changes in facial features on the perception of facial expressions in children with autism and found that children with autism showed a preference for high spatial frequency gaze in negative emotions and a preference for low spatial frequency facial expressions in positive emotions.The results of the three experiments were combined to draw the following four conclusions: 1.children with autism show the same social stimulus orienting characteristics as ordinary children in dynamic situations;2.children with autism have validity differences in emotional perception characteristics and are influenced by external expressions of emotion,and are better at perceiving positive emotions and overall expressions;3.children with autism have the feature of downward shift of attention allocation in the process of emotion perception;4.children with autism present advantages of overall processing of positive emotions versus detailed processing of negative emotions in facial expressions.Based on the findings of the study,the following three recommendations are made in relation to the actual needs: 1.Evidence-based research should quantify the orientation model of emotion perception and enrich the clinical indicators of early screening for autism.2.Teachers and interventionists should maintain the simplicity and consistency of nonverbal information and play the role of body expressions in emotion intervention research.3.Teachers and interventionists should grasp the dualpath model of emotion and refine the explanation of the characteristics of emotion.