Department of Psychology.
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences.
Emotion. 2020 Sep;20(6):980-992. doi: 10.1037/emo0000628. Epub 2019 Jul 29.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their first-degree relatives show differences from neurotypical individuals in emotional face processing. Prospective studies of infant siblings of children with ASD, a group at high risk for autism (HRA), allow researchers to examine the early emergence of these differences. This study used eye tracking to examine disengagement of attention from emotional faces (fearful, happy, neutral) at 6, 9, and 12 months in low-risk control infants (LRC) and HRA infants who received a subsequent clinical judgment of ASD (HRA+) or non-ASD (HRA-). Infants saw centrally presented faces followed by a peripheral distractor (with face remaining present). For each emotion, latency to shift to the distractor and percentage of trials with no shift were calculated. Results showed increased saccadic latency and a greater percentage of no-shift trials for fearful faces. No between-group differences were present for emotion; however, there was an interaction between age and group for disengagement latency, with HRA+ infants slower to shift at 12 months compared with the other 2 groups. Exploratory correlational analyses looking at shift biases to fearful faces alongside measures of social behavior at 12 and 18 months (from the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales) revealed that for HRA+ infants, 9- and 12-month fear biases were significantly related to 12- and 18-month social abilities, respectively. This work suggests that both low- and high-risk infants show biases to threat-relevant faces, and that for HRA+, differences in attention shifting emerge with age, and a stronger fear bias could potentially relate to less social difficulty. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）个体及其一级亲属在情绪面孔处理方面与神经典型个体存在差异。对自闭症儿童的婴儿兄弟姐妹（高风险自闭症个体，HRA）进行前瞻性研究，使研究人员能够研究这些差异的早期出现。本研究使用眼动追踪技术，在 6、9 和 12 个月时，检查了低风险对照组婴儿（LRC）和随后临床诊断为自闭症（HRA+）或非自闭症（HRA-）的 HRA 婴儿对情绪面孔（恐惧、快乐、中性）的注意力脱离情况。婴儿观看中央呈现的面孔，然后呈现外周干扰物（面孔仍存在）。对于每种情绪，计算转移到干扰物的潜伏期和没有转移的试验百分比。结果表明，恐惧面孔的眼跳潜伏期增加，无转移试验的比例增加。情绪方面没有组间差异；然而，在脱离潜伏期方面，年龄和组之间存在交互作用，与其他 2 组相比，HRA+婴儿在 12 个月时转移速度较慢。探索性相关分析，在 12 个月和 18 个月时（从沟通和符号行为量表），观察到对恐惧面孔的转移偏差以及社交行为的测量，结果表明，对于 HRA+婴儿，9 个月和 12 个月的恐惧偏差与 12 个月和 18 个月的社交能力分别显著相关。这项工作表明，低风险和高风险婴儿都表现出对威胁相关面孔的偏见，而对于 HRA+，注意力转移的差异随着年龄的增长而出现，更强的恐惧偏见可能与较少的社交困难有关。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。
