School of Psychology, Ridley Building, Newcastle University, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, England, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 Jun;48(7):1914-22. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.03.010. Epub 2010 Mar 19.
The Williams syndrome (WS) social phenotype is characterised by a high level of social engagement, heightened empathy and prolonged attention to people's faces. These behaviours appear in contradiction to research reporting problems recognising and interpreting basic emotions and more complex mental states from other people. The current task involved dynamic (moving) face stimuli of an actor depicting complex mental states (e.g., worried, disinterested). Cues from the eye and mouth regions were systematically frozen and kept neutrally expressive to help identify the source of mental state information in typical development and WS. Eighteen individuals with WS (aged 8-23 years) and matched groups of typically developing participants were most accurate inferring mental states from whole dynamic faces. In this condition individuals with WS performed at a level predicted by chronological age. When face parts (eyes or mouth) were frozen and neutrally expressive, individuals with WS showed the greatest decrement in performance when the eye region was uninformative. We propose that using moving whole face stimuli individuals with WS can infer mental states and the eye region plays a particularly important role in performance.
威廉姆斯综合征（WS）的社会表型的特点是高水平的社会参与度、同理心增强以及对人脸的长时间关注。这些行为似乎与研究报告中的问题相矛盾，即无法识别和解释他人的基本情绪和更复杂的心理状态。当前的任务涉及到一个演员的动态（移动）面部刺激，这些刺激描绘了复杂的心理状态（例如，担心、不感兴趣）。眼睛和嘴部区域的线索被系统地冻结并保持中性表情，以帮助识别典型发育和 WS 中的心理状态信息的来源。18 名 WS 患者（年龄 8-23 岁）和匹配的正常发育参与者组最准确地从整个动态面部推断出心理状态。在这种情况下，WS 患者的表现与实际年龄相匹配。当面部部分（眼睛或嘴）被冻结并保持中性表情时，当眼睛区域没有信息时，WS 患者的表现下降最大。我们提出，使用移动的整个面部刺激，WS 患者可以推断出心理状态，而眼睛区域在表现中起着特别重要的作用。
