Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University.
School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University.
J Abnorm Psychol. 2018 Oct;127(7):722-732. doi: 10.1037/abn0000372.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit a reduced duration of eye contact compared with typically developing (TD) individuals. This reduced eye contact has been theorized to be a strategy to relieve discomfort elicited by direct eye contact (Tanaka & Sung, 2016). Looking at threatening facial expressions may elicit more discomfort and consequently more eye avoidance in ASD individuals than looking at nonthreatening expressions. We explored whether eye avoidance in children with ASD is modulated by the social threat level of emotional expressions. In this study, 2- to 5-year-old children with and without ASD viewed faces with happy, angry, sad, and neutral expressions, while their eye movements were recorded. We observed the following: (a) when confronted with angry faces, the children with ASD fixated less on the eyes than did TD children, persistently across time; (b) the group differences in the overall eye-looking time were rarely found for happy, neutral, and sad faces; (c) the ASD group showed eye avoidance for neutral faces between 1,000 ms and 2,900 ms after the stimulus onset. Additionally, both groups spent more time looking at the angry faces than the faces showing other emotions. Considering that the children with ASD spent less time looking at the eyes of the angry faces than other emotional faces, the results suggest a combination of vigilance to threatening faces and an avoidance of the eyes in children with ASD. Our study not only extends the gaze aversion hypothesis but also has implications for the treatment and screening of ASD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）个体与典型发育（TD）个体相比，目光接触持续时间较短。这种目光接触减少被认为是一种缓解直接目光接触引起的不适的策略（Tanaka & Sung，2016）。与非威胁性表情相比，观看威胁性面部表情可能会在 ASD 个体中引起更多的不适，从而导致更多的目光回避。我们探讨了 ASD 儿童的目光回避是否受到情绪表达的社会威胁程度的调节。在这项研究中，2 至 5 岁的 ASD 儿童和 TD 儿童观看了带有快乐、愤怒、悲伤和中性表情的面孔，同时记录了他们的眼球运动。我们观察到：（a）当面对愤怒的面孔时，ASD 儿童的注视时间比 TD 儿童少，并且持续时间较长；（b）在快乐、中性和悲伤面孔上，组间的整体注视时间差异很少；（c）ASD 组在刺激出现后 1000 到 2900 毫秒之间对中性面孔表现出目光回避。此外，两组都花更多的时间看愤怒的面孔，而不是其他表情的面孔。考虑到 ASD 儿童看愤怒面孔的眼睛时间比其他情绪面孔少，结果表明 ASD 儿童对威胁面孔保持警惕并避免看眼睛。我们的研究不仅扩展了凝视回避假说，而且对 ASD 的治疗和筛查具有启示意义。（PsycINFO 数据库记录（c）2018 APA，保留所有权利）。
