Emotional face recognition in male adolescents with autism spectrum disorder or disruptive behavior disorder: an eye-tracking study

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), and Conduct Disorder (CD) are often associated with emotion recognition difficulties. This is the first eye-tracking study to examine emotional face recognition (i.e., gazing behavior) in a direct comparison of male adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder or Oppositional Defiant Disorder/Conduct Disorder, and typically developing (TD) individuals. We also investigate the role of psychopathic traits, callous–unemotional (CU) traits, and subtypes of aggressive behavior in emotional face recognition. A total of 122 male adolescents (N = 50 ASD, N = 44 ODD/CD, and N = 28 TD) aged 12–19 years (M = 15.4 years, SD= 1.9) were included in the current study for the eye-tracking experiment. Participants were presented with neutral and emotional faces using a Tobii 1750 eye-tracking monitor to record gaze behavior. Our main dependent eye-tracking variables were: (1) fixation duration to the eyes of a face and (2) time to the first fixation to the eyes. Since distributions of eye-tracking variables were not completely Gaussian, non-parametric tests were chosen to investigate gaze behavior across the diagnostic groups with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder/Conduct Disorder, and Typically Developing individuals. Furthermore, we used Spearman correlations to investigate the links with psychopathy, callous, and unemotional traits and subtypes of aggression as assessed by questionnaires. The relative total fixation duration to the eyes was decreased in both the Autism Spectrum Disorder group and the Oppositional Defiant Disorder/Conduct Disorder group for several emotional expressions. In both the Autism Spectrum Disorder and the Oppositional Defiant Disorder/Conduct Disorder group, increased time to first fixation on the eyes of fearful faces only was nominally significant. The time to first fixation on the eyes was nominally correlated with psychopathic traits and proactive aggression. The current findings do not support strong claims for differential cross-disorder eye-gazing deficits and for a role of shared underlying psychopathic traits, callous–unemotional traits, and aggression subtypes. Our data provide valuable and novel insights into gaze timing distributions when looking at the eyes of a fearful face.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s00787-018-1174-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Emotion Recognition Performance in Children with Callous Unemotional Traits is Modulated by Co-occurring Autistic Traits

“…However, there was no significant association between RT and autistic traits in the dynamic paradigm (RT was not collected in the static paradigm). We found a marginal association between autistic traits and looking time to the eyes for static expressions (similar to Bours et al, 2018), in the direction of reduced looking to the eyes overall, but no effect for dynamic expressions. We included autistic traits in the model to test whether they modulated the association between CU-traits and ER.…”

“…A recent eye-tracking study of static ER in relation to youth with ASD diagnosis and disruptive behavior disorders (i.e. oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder) found both groups spent less time looking at the eyes as compared to typically developing youth (Bours et al, 2018). Differences were found in relation to ER for neutral, sad, and fearful faces (in that those with disruptive behavior disorders performed worse than those with ASD), but these did not survive adjustment for multiple comparisons.…”

“…It would be ideal to use static stills taken from the dynamic clips and the same response method to allow a better-controlled comparison of ER for static versus dynamic expressions. That said, the static stimuli are well validated, and have been widely used to measure ER impairments in youth with CU-traits across a variety of samples (Bours et al, 2018;Sebastian et al, 2013;White et al, 2016), thus providing a reliable baseline of the children's abilities. The use of naturalistic stimuli has both advantages and disadvantages.…”

Eye tracking – The overlooked method to measure cognition in neurodegeneration?

“…Eye tracking (ET) technology is becoming increasingly popular due to the development of precise, cost efficient, portable and user-friendly eye trackers that can be used in different settings, facilitating studies in several populations. Indeed, ET has been shown to be a feasible and valid method used to study cognition in infants (Wass & Smith, 2014;Boardman & Fletcher-Watson, 2017), healthy adults (Perrin et al, 2017) and several clinical populations (Bours et al, 2018;Li et al, 2016;García-Blanco et al, 2017).…”

Reduced Amygdala–Prefrontal Functional Connectivity in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Co-occurring Disruptive Behavior

“…In children with DBDs, the presence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits, defined by a lack of guilt, empathy, or remorse, can be associated with higher levels of aggressive and antisocial behaviors (23). Children with ASD can also exhibit elevated levels of CU traits relative to typically developing children (24)(25)(26)(27) and impaired recognition of distress cues common to children with DBDs plus CU traits (28,29). The association of disruptive behavior with amygdala reactivity to emotional faces can also be moderated by the presence of CU traits; specifically, aggressive behavior in children with DBDs with CU traits is linked with amygdala hypoactivity in response to fearful facial expressions (11,(30)(31)(32).…”