Abstract
Emotion recognition from facial expressions and words conveying emotions is considered crucial for the development of interpersonal relations (Pochon and Declercq, 2013). Although Down syndrome (DS) has received growing attention in the last two decades, emotional development has remained underexplored, perhaps because of the stereotype of high sociability in persons with DS. Yet recently, there is some literature that is suggesting the existence of specific deficits in emotion recognition in DS. The current study aimed to expand our knowledge on how individuals with DS process emotion expressions from faces and words by adopting a powerful methodological paradigm, namely priming. The purpose is to analyse to what extent emotion recognition in DS can occur through different processes than in typical development. Individuals with DS (N = 20) were matched to a control group (N = 20) on vocabulary knowledge (PPTV) and non-verbal ability (Raven’s matrices). Subsequently a priming paradigm was adopted: stimuli were photos of faces with different facial expressions (happy, sad, neutral) and three words (happy, sad, neutral). On a computer screen the first item (face or word) was presented for a very short time (prime) and afterward a stimulus (face or word) appeared (target). Participants had to recognize whether the target was an emotion (sad/happy) or not (neutral). Four prime-target pairs were presented (face-word; word-face; word-word; face-word) in two conditions: congruent (same emotion prime/target) and incongruent (different emotion prime/target). The results failed to show evidence for differential processing during emotion recognition between the two groups matched for verbal and non-verbal abilities. Both groups showed a typical priming effect: In the incongruent condition, slower reaction times were recorded, in particular when the target to be recognized is the face, providing evidence that the stimuli were indeed processed. Overall, the data of the current work seem to support the idea of similar developmental trajectories in individuals with DS and TD of the same verbal and non-verbal level, at least as far as the processing of simple visual and linguistic stimuli conveying basic emotions is concerned. Results are interpreted in relation to recent finding on emotion recognition from faces and words in DS.
Highlights
Down syndrome (DS) is the most common genetic intellectual disability and for this reason, for many years, DS has received great attention from researchers
Post hoc analyses revealed that there are no differences in the accuracy of the recognition of the happy and neutral emotion across all the four conditions: for both, participants resulted highly accurate across all the conditions
The current study was aimed to analyse the ability of adults with DS to identify two basic emotions, namely happiness and sadness in relation to neutrality, either through faces or written words
Summary
Down syndrome (DS) is the most common genetic intellectual disability and for this reason, for many years, DS has received great attention from researchers. This might have an impact on the performance of individuals with DS because of the influence of emotional language on the emotion perception (Lindquist et al, 2006; Barrett et al, 2007) In this respect, Channell et al (2014) examined emotion recognition of a group of children and adolescents with DS through tasks that measured the ability to recognize others’ emotions from static and dynamic facial expressions and from the social context and compared to typically developing (TD) children of similar developmental levels. The authors conclude by highlighting the importance of using dynamic, strictly non-verbal tasks for participants with DS, and more generally for populations with language disorders These four studies are the only recent studies in which children with DS did not show weakness in recognizing emotions from facial expressions; they have raised the question of whether the difficulties reported for DS children in previous studies were at least in part due to the use of emotional labels. – Both the accuracy and the reaction times were analyzed through the analyses of variance
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