Abstract
The hypersocial profile characterizing individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), and particularly their attraction to human faces and their desire to form relationships with other people, could favor the development of their emotion recognition capacities. This study seeks to better understand the development of emotion recognition capacities in WS. The ability to recognize six emotions was assessed in 15 participants with WS. Their performance was compared to that of 15 participants with Down syndrome (DS) and 15 typically developing (TD) children of the same non-verbal developmental age, as assessed with Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices (RCPM; Raven et al., 1998). The analysis of the three groups’ results revealed that the participants with WS performed better than the participants with DS and also than the TD children. Individuals with WS performed at a similar level to TD participants in terms of recognizing different types of emotions. The study of development trajectories confirmed that the participants with WS presented the same development profile as the TD participants. These results seem to indicate that the recognition of emotional facial expressions constitutes a real strength in people with WS.
Highlights
The diagnostic criteria of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities [AAIDD], 2013 refer to a social adaptation deficit affecting many people with intellectual disabilities (IDs)
The distribution was normal for the overall results on the control and emotional tasks and for each emotion in the emotional task, which made it possible to carry out analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by post hoc tests (Tukey’s test)
Post hoc comparisons showed that the Williams syndrome (WS) group obtained better results than the Down syndrome (DS) group (p = 0.03) or the typically developing (TD)-DA group (p = 0.002), whereas the DS and TD-DA groups performed at equivalent levels
Summary
The diagnostic criteria of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities [AAIDD], 2013 refer to a social adaptation deficit affecting many people with intellectual disabilities (IDs). The study described here aims to better understand the development of emotion recognition capacities in people with Williams syndrome (WS), a neurodevelopmental disorder of genetic origin characterized by mild to moderate ID, a heterogeneous cognitive profile, and atypical social behavior, among other things. This social behavior is characterized by “hypersociability,” which manifests itself in a particular attraction to faces, high caring, and “niceness,” a lack of fear of strangers, and excessive talkativeness (Jones et al, 2000). According to Van Den Heuvel et al (2016), individuals with
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