Difficulties in Recognising Dynamic but not Static Emotional Body Movements in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Mazzoni, Noemi; Ricciardelli, Paola; Actis-Grosso, Rossana; Venuti, Paola

doi:10.1007/s10803-021-05015-7

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 91 publications

(145 reference statements)

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“…(ii) Autistic traits and body language reading. Mounting evidence points to alterations of both BM processing and affective body language reading in ASD ( Hubert et al, 2007 ; Freitag et al, 2008 ; Atkinson, 2009 ; Klin et al, 2009 ; Kaiser et al, 2010 ; Nackaerts et al, 2012 ; Pavlova, 2012 ; Centelles et al, 2013 ; Mazzoni et al, 2020 , 2021 ; Jack et al, 2021 ; Sotoodeh et al, 2021 ; for review, see Pavlova, 2012 ; Barton, 2021 ), though intact BM processing is also reported ( Murphy et al, 2009 ). Most important, the sensitivity to BM is inversely linked both to the severity of ASD ( Blake et al, 2003 ) and to autistic symptomatology as measured by the autistic diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS) in adolescents ( Koldewyn et al, 2010 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits

Pavlova

Romagnano²,

Kubon³

et al. 2022

Front. Neurosci.

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While reading covered with masks faces during the COVID-19 pandemic, for efficient social interaction, we need to combine information from different sources such as the eyes (without faces hidden by masks) and bodies. This may be challenging for individuals with neuropsychiatric conditions, in particular, autism spectrum disorders. Here we examined whether reading of dynamic faces, bodies, and eyes are tied in a gender-specific way, and how these capabilities are related to autistic traits expression. Females and males accomplished a task with point-light faces along with a task with point-light body locomotion portraying different emotional expressions. They had to infer emotional content of displays. In addition, participants were administered the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, modified and Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire. The findings show that only in females, inferring emotions from dynamic bodies and faces are firmly linked, whereas in males, reading in the eyes is knotted with face reading. Strikingly, in neurotypical males only, accuracy of face, body, and eyes reading was negatively tied with autistic traits. The outcome points to gender-specific modes in social cognition: females rely upon merely dynamic cues while reading faces and bodies, whereas males most likely trust configural information. The findings are of value for examination of face and body language reading in neuropsychiatric conditions, in particular, autism, most of which are gender/sex-specific. This work suggests that if male individuals with autistic traits experience difficulties in reading covered with masks faces, these deficits may be unlikely compensated by reading (even dynamic) bodies and faces. By contrast, in females, reading covered faces as well as reading language of dynamic bodies and faces are not compulsorily connected to autistic traits preventing them from paying high costs for maladaptive social interaction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits

Pavlova

Romagnano²,

Kubon³

et al. 2022

Front. Neurosci.

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“…Stimuli were taken from Mazzoni et al (2022) and consisted of 12 pictures displaying the bodies of four actors (two females) enacting fearful, happy, and neutral postures with blurred faces on a black background. In all pictures, individuals performed meaningful actions so that both emotional and neutral images illustrated biological movements.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… Twelve colored pictures were taken from Mazzoni et al (2022) database. Photos displayed the bodies of two actors and two actresses with blurred faces on a black background.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant

et al. 2022

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A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial to having a reliable behavioral effect. Such evidence indicated that emotional facial expressions do not automatically influence motor responses in healthy young adults, but they do so only when intrinsically pertinent to the ongoing subject’s goals. Given the theoretical relevance of these findings, it is essential to assess their generalizability to different, socially relevant emotional stimuli such as emotional body postures. To address this issue, we compared the performance of 36 right-handed participants in two different versions of a Go/No-go task. In the Emotional Discrimination task, participants were required to withhold their responses at the display of emotional body postures (fearful or happy) and to move at the presentation of neutral postures. Differently, in the control task, the same images were shown, but participants had to respond according to the color of the actor/actress’ t-shirt, disregarding the emotional content. Results showed that participants made more commission errors (instances in which they moved even though the No-go signal was presented) for happy than fearful body postures in the Emotional Discrimination task. However, this difference disappeared in the control task. Such evidence indicates that, like facial emotion, emotional body expressions do not influence motor control automatically, but only when they are task-relevant.

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“…In contrast to the many well-established tools available for studying emotion recognition from faces, there has long been a relative paucity of tools to assess emotion recognition from body expressions. Over the last two decades, however, the interest in studying emotional body expressions has steadily increased, leading to the development of different emotional body datasets (examples using static stimuli: e.g., 19 , 20 , examples using dynamic stimuli: e.g., 21 – 24 ). Thoroughly validated tools that attempted to include both face and body expressions alongside each other remain scarce, however (e.g., the PONS test 25 or the Bochum Emotional Stimulus Set 26 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

EmBody/EmFace as a new open tool to assess emotion recognition from body and face expressions

Lott

Spengler

Stächele

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

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Nonverbal expressions contribute substantially to social interaction by providing information on another person’s intentions and feelings. While emotion recognition from dynamic facial expressions has been widely studied, dynamic body expressions and the interplay of emotion recognition from facial and body expressions have attracted less attention, as suitable diagnostic tools are scarce. Here, we provide validation data on a new open source paradigm enabling the assessment of emotion recognition from both 3D-animated emotional body expressions (Task 1: EmBody) and emotionally corresponding dynamic faces (Task 2: EmFace). Both tasks use visually standardized items depicting three emotional states (angry, happy, neutral), and can be used alone or together. We here demonstrate successful psychometric matching of the EmBody/EmFace items in a sample of 217 healthy subjects with excellent retest reliability and validity (correlations with the Reading-the-Mind-in-the-Eyes-Test and Autism-Spectrum Quotient, no correlations with intelligence, and given factorial validity). Taken together, the EmBody/EmFace is a novel, effective (< 5 min per task), highly standardized and reliably precise tool to sensitively assess and compare emotion recognition from body and face stimuli. The EmBody/EmFace has a wide range of potential applications in affective, cognitive and social neuroscience, and in clinical research studying face- and body-specific emotion recognition in patient populations suffering from social interaction deficits such as autism, schizophrenia, or social anxiety.

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Difficulties in Recognising Dynamic but not Static Emotional Body Movements in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Cited by 14 publications

References 91 publications

Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits

Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits

Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant

EmBody/EmFace as a new open tool to assess emotion recognition from body and face expressions

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