"Motion or Emotion? Recognition of Emotional Bodily Expressions in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder With and Without Intellectual Disability".

Paola Ricciardelli,Isotta Landi,Paola Venuti,Noemi Mazzoni,Rossana Actis-Grosso

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00478

Abstract

The recognition of emotional body movement (BM) is impaired in individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder ASD, yet it is not clear whether the difficulty is related to the encoding of body motion, emotions, or both. Besides, BM recognition has been traditionally studied using point-light displays stimuli (PLDs) and is still underexplored in individuals with ASD and intellectual disability (ID). In the present study, we investigated the recognition of happy, fearful, and neutral BM in children with ASD with and without ID. In a non-verbal recognition task, participants were asked to recognize pure-body-motion and visible-body-form stimuli (by means of point-light displays-PLDs and full-light displays-FLDs, respectively). We found that the children with ASD were less accurate than TD children in recognizing both the emotional and neutral BM, either when presented as FLDs or PLDs. These results suggest that the difficulty in understanding the observed BM may rely on atypical processing of BM information rather than emotion. Moreover, we found that the accuracy improved with age and IQ only in children with ASD without ID, suggesting that high level of cognitive resources can mediate the acquisition of compensatory mechanisms which develop with age.

Highlights

As social individuals, we are constantly surrounded by other people and daily involved in social interactions
We initially predicted that if the impairment in recognizing the emotional body movement (BM) was due to a specific difficulty in emotion processing, the children with autisms spectrum disorder (ASD) should recognize the emotional stimuli with poorer accuracy and higher response times (RTs), while they should not differ from typical developing individuals (TD) children in recognizing the neutral stimuli
Our results showed that children with ASD, independently of their IQ level, were less accurate than TD children in recognizing both the emotional and the neutral BM, either when displayed as full-light display stimuli (FLDs) or point-light displays stimuli (PLDs)

Summary

Introduction

We are constantly surrounded by other people and daily involved in social interactions. In typical developing individuals (TD), such a description is sufficient for inferring a great amount of social information, such as identity (Kozlowski and Cutting, 1977; Troje et al, 2005); gender (Kozlowski and Cutting, 1977; Pollick et al, 2002; Johnson et al, 2011); the nature of the actions (Johansson, 1973; Dittrich, 1993; Alaerts et al, 2011); intentions (Roché et al, 2013); and – more importantly to the present study – emotions (Dittrich et al, 1996; Atkinson et al, 2004; Clarke et al, 2005; Roether et al, 2009)

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