Department of Psychiatry, Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine and Graduate Institute of Medicine, College of Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Department of Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Compr Psychiatry. 2019 Apr;90:7-13. doi: 10.1016/j.comppsych.2018.12.010. Epub 2019 Jan 4.
Impaired social interaction is one of the core characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study was conducted to compare the facial emotion recognition (FER) abilities and emotional interference of adolescents with and without high-functioning ASD by performing the FER Task (FERT) using the faces of Taiwanese people and the Implicit Association Test (IAT), respectively.
This study recruited 71 adolescents with high-functioning ASD who aged at 11 to 18 years old as the ASD group and 63 adolescents without ASD from the Taiwanese community as the non-ASD group. We investigated FER abilities by conducting the FERT on six types of emotional expression with a three-level intensity rating, and we performed the IAT for evaluating the strength of a person's automatic association with mental representations of emotions in memory.
Compared with the non-ASD group, the ASD group performed significantly worse on facial emotion differentiation and the ranking and rating of emotional intensity in the FERT. The ASD group had higher IAT scores than the non-ASD group.
The results suggest that adolescents with high-functioning ASD have subtle deficits in facial emotion processing and emotional interference.
社交互动障碍是自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的核心特征之一。本研究旨在通过使用台湾人脸图片的面部表情识别任务（FERT）和内隐联想测验（IAT），分别比较高功能 ASD 青少年与非 ASD 青少年的面部表情识别（FER）能力和情绪干扰。
本研究招募了 71 名年龄在 11 至 18 岁的高功能 ASD 青少年作为 ASD 组，以及 63 名来自台湾社区的非 ASD 青少年作为非 ASD 组。我们通过进行 FERT 来评估六种不同强度的情绪表达，以考察 FER 能力，通过 IAT 评估一个人在记忆中对情绪的心理表现的自动联想的强度。
与非 ASD 组相比，ASD 组在面部情绪区分、FERT 中情绪强度的排序和评分方面表现明显更差。ASD 组的 IAT 得分高于非 ASD 组。
研究结果表明，高功能 ASD 青少年在面部情绪处理和情绪干扰方面存在细微缺陷。
