Date Presented 03/27/20
Understanding the mechanisms of emotion production and emotion processing is important for addressing social communication deficits in ASD. Our results suggest that prompted emotional expressions in individuals with ASD are considered less genuinely expressed than those of their typically developing peers. This authenticity is related to neural responses in social processing brain regions. These findings offer insight for OTs to better treat and develop therapies to address social deficits in ASD.
Primary Author and Speaker: Emily Kilroy
Contributing Authors: Sharada Krishnan, Christiana Butera, Laura Harrison, Aditya Jayashankar, Anusha Hossain, Alexis Nalbach, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh
PURPOSE: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in social communication and social processing. Previous research indicates that individuals with ASD have abnormal neural responses to observing emotional expressions (Dapretto et al., 2006), and atypical emotional expression production (Trevisan, Hoskyn, & Birmingham, 2018). To date, no research has examined how emotional face perception relates to the accuracy or quality of emotional face production (EFP) in individuals with ASD. The aim of this study is to relate neural responses when observing facial expressions to the quality of prompted emotional expressions in individuals with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) peers. Understanding the mechanisms and relationship between emotion production and emotion processing is important for differentiating social communication deficits in ASD, and informing targeted interventions for reciprocal social communication in children with ASD.
DESIGN: This quantitative study employed an experimental design. Participants age 9-17 were recruited through clinics, schools, and social media groups. All participants were right-handed, English speakers, and had an IQ > 80. ASD participants had a current ASD diagnosis, and TD participants had no existing psychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorders.
METHOD: Fourteen youths with ASD, and 14 TD peers were filmed while acting out different emotional expressions (i.e., happy, disgust). Videos of each produced expression were rated by healthy college students on perceived accuracy and authenticity of portrayed emotions. EFP accuracy was measured by the percentage of agreement between the intended expression and the emotion identified in the survey. EFP authenticity was measured by the degree to which survey respondents found the portrayed emotion to be genuinely expressed. MRI data were collected on a 3T scanner while participants watched videos of emotional faces presented in a block design. Standard preprocessing was applied. Parameter estimates from previously established functional regions of interest (Casper et al., 2010) known to respond to emotional face observation (i.e., inferior frontal gyrus; IFG) were correlated with EFP.
RESULTS: No group differences in the EFP accuracy were found (p>.05), however, the TD group was rated to have significantly greater expression authenticity than the ASD group (p=.039). Across all participants, activation of the right IFG during observation of emotional faces was positively correlated with the mean score of EFP accuracy (R=.357, p=.042) and authenticity (R=.420, p=.037). When looking within groups, authenticity in the ASD group was positively correlated with neural activation of the right IFG when observing facial expressions, although this relationship did not reach significance (R=.531, p=.062).
CONCLUSION: Data from this research suggests that while individuals with ASD produce intentional expressions that can be accurately identified, the quality of their portrayed emotions is considered less genuine compared to their TD peers. Moreover, this authenticity is positively related to neural activation in regions important for social processing. These results indicate that neural mechanisms of expressive facial processing may also underlie the perceived sincerity of expressive facial production. These findings offer insights for occupational therapists to deliver more client-centered care for social-emotional processing needs by addressing both production, as well as, recognition of emotional faces. Since the IFG is the hub of the mirror neuron network, this research suggests capitalizing on shared systems for observing and performing actions in therapeutic settings to address social skills necessary for reciprocal social communication.
References
Dapretto, M., Davies, M. S., Pfeifer, J. H., Scott, A. A., Sigman, M., Bookheimer, S. Y., & Iacoboni, M. (2006). Understanding emotions in others: mirror neuron dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorders. Nature neuroscience, 9(1), 28. DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1611
Trevisan, D. A., Hoskyn, M., & Birmingham, E. (2018). Facial Expression Production in Autism: A Meta-Analysis. Autism Research, 11(12), 1586-1601. DOI https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2037
Caspers, S., Zilles, K., Laird, A. R., & Eickhoff, S. B. (2010). ALE meta-analysis of action observation and imitation in the human brain. Neuroimage, 50(3), 1148-1167. DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.12.112
