Jelili Selima, Halayem Soumeyya, Taamallah Amal, Ennaifer Selima, Rajhi Olfa, Moussa Mohamed, Ghazzei Melek, Nabli Ahmed, Ouanes Sami, Abbes Zeineb, Hajri Malek, Fakhfakh Radhouane, Bouden Asma
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Razi Hospital, Manouba, Tunisia.
Faculty of Medicine, Tunis El Manar University, Tunis, Tunisia.
Front Psychiatry. 2021 Aug 20;12:693310. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.693310. eCollection 2021.
A multitude of research on facial emotion recognition (FER) in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been published since several years. However, these studies have mainly used static high intensity stimuli, including adult and/or children facial emotions. This current study investigated FER in children with ASD using an innovative task, composed of a combination of static (114 pictures) and dynamic (36 videos) subtests, including children, adolescent, and adult male and female faces, with high, medium, and low intensity of basic facial emotions, and neutral expression. The ASD group consisted of 45 Tunisian verbal children, and the control group consisted of 117 tunisian typically developing children. Both groups were aged 7-12 years. After adjusting for sex, age, mental age, and school grade, the ASD group scored lower than controls on all tests except for the recognition of happiness and fear in the static subtest, and the recognition of happiness, fear, and sadness in the dynamic subtest ( ≥ 0.05). In the ASD group, the total score of both the static and the dynamic subtest were positively correlated with the school grade ( < 0.001), but not with age, or mental age. Children with ASD performed better in recognizing facial emotions in children than in adults and adolescents on videos and photos ( < 0.001). Impairments in FER would have negative impact on the child's social development. Thus, the creation of new intervention instruments aiming to improve emotion recognition strategies at an early stage to individuals with ASD seems fundamental.
近年来，已经发表了大量关于自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）面部情绪识别（FER）的研究。然而，这些研究主要使用静态高强度刺激，包括成人和/或儿童的面部表情。本研究使用一项创新任务对患有ASD的儿童进行了FER调查，该任务由静态（114张图片）和动态（36个视频）子测试组成，包括儿童、青少年以及成年男性和女性的面部，具有高、中、低强度的基本面部表情以及中性表情。ASD组由45名突尼斯能言语儿童组成，对照组由117名突尼斯发育正常的儿童组成。两组年龄均为7至12岁。在对性别、年龄、心理年龄和年级进行调整后，除了在静态子测试中对快乐和恐惧的识别以及在动态子测试中对快乐、恐惧和悲伤的识别外，ASD组在所有测试中的得分均低于对照组（P≥0.05）。在ASD组中，静态和动态子测试的总分与年级呈正相关（P<0.001），但与年龄或心理年龄无关。患有ASD的儿童在视频和照片中识别儿童面部表情的表现优于成人和青少年（P<0.001）。FER受损会对儿童的社交发展产生负面影响。因此，创建新的干预工具以尽早改善ASD个体的情绪识别策略似乎至关重要。
