Lozier Leah M, Vanmeter John W, Marsh Abigail A
Georgetown University.
Dev Psychopathol. 2014 Nov;26(4 Pt 1):933-45. doi: 10.1017/S0954579414000479. Epub 2014 Jun 10.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by social impairments, including inappropriate responses to affective stimuli and nonverbal cues, which may extend to poor face-emotion recognition. However, the results of empirical studies of face-emotion recognition in individuals with ASD have yielded inconsistent findings that occlude understanding the role of face-emotion recognition deficits in the development of ASD. The goal of this meta-analysis was to address three as-yet unanswered questions. Are ASDs associated with consistent face-emotion recognition deficits? Do deficits generalize across multiple emotional expressions or are they limited to specific emotions? Do age or cognitive intelligence affect the magnitude of identified deficits? The results indicate that ASDs are associated with face-emotion recognition deficits across multiple expressions and that the magnitude of these deficits increases with age and cannot be accounted for by intelligence. These findings suggest that, whereas neurodevelopmental processes and social experience produce improvements in general face-emotion recognition abilities over time during typical development, children with ASD may experience disruptions in these processes, which suggested distributed functional impairment in the neural architecture that subserves face-emotion processing, an effect with downstream developmental consequences.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的特征是社交障碍，包括对情感刺激和非语言线索的不适当反应，这可能延伸至面部表情识别能力较差。然而，对ASD个体面部表情识别的实证研究结果并不一致，这阻碍了我们对面部表情识别缺陷在ASD发展中所起作用的理解。本荟萃分析的目的是解决三个尚未得到解答的问题。ASD是否与一致的面部表情识别缺陷有关？这些缺陷是否普遍存在于多种情感表达中，还是仅限于特定情感？年龄或认知智力是否会影响所确定缺陷的程度？结果表明，ASD与多种表情的面部表情识别缺陷有关，且这些缺陷的程度随年龄增长而增加，无法用智力来解释。这些发现表明，在典型发育过程中，神经发育过程和社会经验会随着时间推移使一般面部表情识别能力得到改善，而患有ASD的儿童可能在这些过程中出现紊乱，这表明在负责面部表情处理的神经结构中存在分布式功能障碍，这种影响具有下游发育后果。
