Ashwin Chris, Chapman Emma, Colle Livia, Baron-Cohen Simon
Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
Soc Neurosci. 2006;1(3-4):349-63. doi: 10.1080/17470910601040772.
Autism and Asperger Syndrome are autism spectrum conditions (ASC) characterized by deficits in understanding others' minds, an aspect of which involves recognizing emotional expressions. This is thought to be related to atypical function and structure of the amygdala, and performance by people with ASC on emotion recognition tasks resembles that seen in people with acquired amygdala damage. In general, emotion recognition findings in ASC have been inconsistent, which may reflect low numbers of participants, low numbers of stimuli and trials, heterogeneity of symptom severity within ASC groups, and ceiling effects on some tasks. The present study tested 39 male adults with ASC and 39 typical male controls on a task of basic emotion recognition from photographs, in two separate experiments. On a control face discrimination task the group with ASC were not impaired. People with ASC were less accurate on the emotion recognition task compared to controls, but only for the negative basic emotions. This is discussed in the light of similar findings from people with damage to the amygdala.
自闭症和阿斯伯格综合征属于自闭症谱系障碍（ASC），其特征在于理解他人心理方面存在缺陷，其中一个方面涉及识别情绪表达。这被认为与杏仁核的非典型功能和结构有关，ASC患者在情绪识别任务中的表现类似于后天杏仁核损伤患者的表现。总体而言，ASC患者的情绪识别研究结果并不一致，这可能反映出参与者数量少、刺激和试验次数少、ASC组内症状严重程度的异质性以及某些任务中的天花板效应。本研究在两项独立实验中，对39名患有ASC的成年男性和39名典型男性对照组进行了一项从照片中识别基本情绪的任务测试。在一项对照面部辨别任务中，ASC组没有受损。与对照组相比，ASC患者在情绪识别任务上的准确性较低，但仅针对负面基本情绪。结合杏仁核损伤患者的类似研究结果对此进行了讨论。
