EEG study of facial emotion recognition in the fathers of autistic children

Abstract

Problems in recognizing facial expressions have been observed in children and adults diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and provided deficits in social interactions. Mild autistic traits have been also detected in first-degree relatives of children with autism, so in this study, difficulty in facial emotion recognition in the fathers of children with autism is investigated using EEG signals. Fifteen biological fathers of children with a diagnosis of autism and fifteen fathers of typically developing children with no personal or family history of autism participated in this study. Recognition of the emotional facial expression task was evaluated using a set of photos from Cohn-Kanade (ck+) consisting of 6 categories (mild and extreme anger, happiness, and sadness). Group Independent Component Analysis (gICA), power spectra and wavelet power were used to analyze the participants’ EEG signals. Using ANOVA for group comparisons showed significant differences (P-value < 0.01) in the relative power and wavelet power of group independent components in two frequency ranges (theta and beta). Post-hoc comparisons showed that the central, right occipital and parietal power of group-ICs differentiated the two groups in recognition of emotions and also, more power differences were detected in recognition of the lower intensity level of emotions in beta frequency (P-value < 0.01). According to the obtained results, ASD fathers had difficulty in identifying facial expressions, in particular, mild expressions, suggesting that ASD fathers may have impaired recognition of emotions as do autistic children.