Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University Inuyama, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2014 May 27;5:461. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00461. eCollection 2014.
Previous studies have demonstrated that angry faces capture humans' attention more rapidly than emotionally positive faces. This phenomenon is referred to as the anger superiority effect (ASE). Despite atypical emotional processing, adults and children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been reported to show ASE as well as typically developed (TD) individuals. So far, however, few studies have clarified whether or not the mechanisms underlying ASE are the same for both TD and ASD individuals. Here, we tested how TD and ASD children process schematic emotional faces during detection by employing a recognition task in combination with a face-in-the-crowd task. Results of the face-in-the-crowd task revealed the prevalence of ASE both in TD and ASD children. However, the results of the recognition task revealed group differences: In TD children, detection of angry faces required more configural face processing and disrupted the processing of local features. In ASD children, on the other hand, it required more feature-based processing rather than configural processing. Despite the small sample sizes, these findings provide preliminary evidence that children with ASD, in contrast to TD children, show quick detection of angry faces by extracting local features in faces.
先前的研究表明，愤怒的面孔比情绪积极的面孔更能迅速吸引人类的注意力。这种现象被称为愤怒优势效应（ASE）。尽管存在非典型的情绪处理，但有报道称，自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的成人和儿童与典型发育（TD）个体一样表现出 ASE。然而，到目前为止，很少有研究阐明 TD 和 ASD 个体的 ASE 背后的机制是否相同。在这里，我们通过在 crowd 任务中结合识别任务来测试 TD 和 ASD 儿童在检测过程中如何处理 schematic 情绪面孔。face-in-the-crowd 任务的结果表明，TD 和 ASD 儿童都普遍存在 ASE。然而，识别任务的结果显示出群体差异：在 TD 儿童中，愤怒面孔的检测需要更多的整体面孔处理，并且会破坏局部特征的处理。另一方面，在 ASD 儿童中，它需要更多基于特征的处理而不是整体处理。尽管样本量较小，但这些发现提供了初步证据，表明与 TD 儿童相比，ASD 儿童通过提取面孔中的局部特征来快速检测愤怒面孔。
