Associations of Autism Spectrum Disorder Traits on Emotion Recognition Accuracy in Early Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Deficits in social cognition are particularly salient in individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which manifest pronounced impairments in processes such as emotion perception, face processing, mentalizing and empathic understanding (Ashwin et al., 2006; Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). Converging research suggests that all individuals vary in social-cognitive ability, ranging from typical development to severe autism at the extreme end with continuously distributed subclinical autistic traits in the general population (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001; Constantino, 2011; Constantino & Todd, 2003; Hoekstra et al. 2007). Since the average age of ASD diagnosis is 4.5 years (Brett et al., 2016), it is important to understand how autistic traits relate to social-cognitive abilities in young children. Thus, this study’s purpose was to investigate the associations of preschoolers rated by their teachers as exhibiting behaviors associated with ASD and their ability to accurately recognize and label emotions.
Data was collected as part of a larger efficacy trial of a social and emotional learning program in the fall of 2019 from children (N = 822; 414 girls; Mage = 46.60; SD=7.0) from 190 classrooms in 62 preschools across six different regions of a Northeastern US state. Direct child assessments were used to capture children’s emotion recognition accuracy of happy, sad, angry, and afraid facial expressions using the Emotion Matching Task (EMT, Izard et al., 2003). Teachers reported on children’s social skills and problem behaviors using the Social Skills Improvement System, which includes the Autism Spectrum subscale used in this study (Gresham & Elliot, 1990).
To explore these relationships further, eight multilevel models were run in Stata 16.1. All models accounted for classroom- and school-level variance and used cluster-robust standard errors. Unconditional models revealed between 4 and 10% of the variance in children’s emotion recognition due to their classroom and 0 and 6% due to their school. All four conditional models accounting for variance in covariates (i.e., family income-to-needs ratio, parental education, child race, child ethnicity, child age, and child gender) and teachers’ ratings of children’s behaviors associated with autism explained between 19 and 33% of the variance in children’s emotion recognition. Overall, children whose teachers rated them higher on behaviors associated with autism tended to score lower in recognition of happy, b = -0.01, p <.001, and sad, b = -0.01, p = .007, with non-statically significant but similar trends for angry and afraid, ps = .061-.244.
To this end, previous studies have found those diagnosed with ASD have difficulty accurately recognizing emotions, specifically anger (Kuusikko et al., 2009), disgust and surprise (Smith et al., 2010), sadness (Balconi et al., 2012), and fear (Evers et al., 2015). Individuals with ASD have been found less accurate than controls for all six basic emotions (Lozier et al., 2014), but virtually no studies have found statistically significant effects in recognizing happy. Thus, there is a need to continue exploring face-emotion recognition deficits related to ASD traits in both clinical and non-clinical samples.

Authors

• Lauren Costello, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Irem Korucu, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Craig S. Bailey, Yale School of Medicine
  Non-Presenting Author