Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA.
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2006;23(2):338-49. doi: 10.1080/02643290542000076.
People with Williams syndrome (WMS) have a unique social phenotype characterised by unusually strong interest in other people and an engaging and empathic personality. Two experiments were designed to test whether this phenotype is associated with relatively spared abilities to decode mental-state information from nonverbal cues. The first experiment involved a modified version of the revised Eyes Test. The second experiment probed the ability to label emotions from brief dynamic facial displays. Adolescents and adults with WMS were compared to age-, IQ-, and language-matched participants with learning/intellectual disabilities, and age-matched normal controls. In both experiments the WMS group performed at a significantly lower level than the normal controls, and no different from the well-matched comparison-group with intellectual disabilities. These findings, contradicting earlier reports in the literature, argue against the view that in WMS social-perceptual abilities are relatively spared and can explain the social profile associated with this neurodevelopmental disorder.
患有威廉姆斯综合征（WMS）的人具有独特的社会表型，其特点是对他人有着异常强烈的兴趣以及热情和富有同理心的个性。设计了两项实验来测试这种表型是否与相对不受影响的从非言语线索解码心理状态信息的能力有关。第一项实验涉及修订后的眼睛测试的修改版本。第二项实验探究了从短暂的动态面部表情中标记情绪的能力。将 WMS 患者的青少年和成年人与年龄、智商和语言匹配的学习/智力残疾参与者以及年龄匹配的正常对照组进行了比较。在这两项实验中，WMS 组的表现明显低于正常对照组，与智力残疾的匹配对照组没有区别。这些发现与文献中的早期报告相矛盾，不支持社交感知能力相对不受影响的观点，也无法解释与这种神经发育障碍相关的社会特征。
