Abstract
Previous studies on attentional bias towards emotional faces in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) provided mixed results. This might be due to differences in the examined attentional bias components and emotional expressions. This study assessed three bias components, hypervigilance, disengagement, and avoidance, using faces with a disgust, happy, or neutral expression in a dot-probe and external cuing task in 18 children with ASD and 21 typically developing (TD) children. The children with ASD initially displayed hypervigilance towards the disgust faces, followed by a general tendency to avoid looking back at the spatial location at which any face, irrespective of its emotional expression, had been presented. These results highlight the importance of differentiating between attentional bias components in research on ASD.
Highlights
Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) refer to a group of neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and interaction, as well as repetitive behavioural patterns and restricted interests[1]
The present study assessed whether children with ASD show an attentional bias towards faces displaying the emotion of disgust relative to happy or neutral faces
The dot-probe task revealed faster responding in children with ASD to the target when it was presented at the previous location of a face displaying disgust than of a face displaying happiness, reflecting an attentional bias for the faces expressing disgust
Summary
Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) refer to a group of neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and interaction, as well as repetitive behavioural patterns and restricted interests[1]. Given the few previous studies and the mixed results, in the present study we examined the three components of attentional bias in children with ASD towards faces expressing the emotion of disgust relative to those with a happy or neutral expression.
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