Face processing and facial emotion recognition in adults with Down syndrome.

Face processing and facial expression recognition was investigated in 17 adults with Down syndrome, and results were compared with those of a child control group matched for receptive vocabulary. On the tasks involving faces without emotional content, the adults with Down syndrome performed significantly worse than did the controls. However, their performance was good on the tests with complete faces. On the facial expression tasks, participants with Down syndrome exhibited particular difficulties with the neutral and surprised expressions. Analysis of their error pattern suggest they had a tendency to judge faces more positively than did the controls. Finally, there were significant relationships among emotional processing, receptive vocabulary, and inhibition measures; nonverbal reasoning ability was not related to any of the tasks.