Evidence of an Own-Age Bias in Facial Emotion Recognition for Adolescents With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

A common interpretation of the face-processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that they arise from a failure to develop normative levels of perceptual expertise. One indicator of perceptual expertise for faces is the own-age bias, operationalized as a processing advantage for faces of one's own age, presumably due to more frequent contact and experience. This effect is especially evident in domains of face recognition memory but less commonly investigated in social-emotional expertise (e.g., facial emotion recognition; FER), where individuals with ASD have shown consistent deficits. In the present study, we investigated whether a FER task would elicit an own-age bias for individuals with and without ASD and explored how the magnitude of an own-age bias may differ as a function of ASD status and symptoms. Ninety-two adolescents (63 male) between the ages of 11 and 14 years completed the child-and adult-face subtests of a standardized FER task. Overall FER accuracy was found to differ by ASD severity, reflecting poorer performance for those with increased symptoms. Results also indicated that an own-age bias was evident, reflecting greater FER performance for child compared to adult faces, for all adolescents regardless of ASD status or symptoms. However, the strength of the observed own-age bias did not differ by ASD status or severity. Findings suggest that face processing abilities of adolescents with ASD may be influenced by experience with specific categories of stimuli, similar to their typically developing peers.

Developmental differences in the visual processing of emotionally ambiguous neutral faces based on perceived valence

“…However, Luo et al [ 26 ] showed that this effect dissipates by 4.5 years of age, which is younger than the faces used for the present study. The use of child faces could also impact the findings by facilitating children’s performance; a recent study of adolescents revealed an own-age bias in emotion recognition [ 27 ]. Another potential limitation is the inclusion of only emotionally ambiguous neutral faces.…”

Categorising emotion words: the influence of response options

“…This list is typically limited to words representing four to six basic (universal) emotion categories (i.e. happy sad, angry, fearful, disgust, surprise) (Airdrie et al, 2018;Grosbras et al, 2018;Hauschild et al, 2020;Melendez et al, 2020;Zupan & Babbage, 2017). This format permits ease of analysis, reproducibility, and comparison across studies but also constrains responses, potentially resulting in artificial and inflated agreement among participants (Barrett et al, 2011;Limbrecht-Ecklundt et al, 2013;Nelson & Russell, 2013) and masking nuances in how people conceptualise and interpret emotion (Turkstra et al, 2017).…”

Impaired Recognition of Static and Dynamic Facial Emotions in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Stimuli of Varying Intensities, Different Genders, and Age Ranges Faces

“…This hypothesis was supported by the study of Hauschild, indicating that adolescents, independently of ASD diagnostic status or severity of troubles had greater FER performance for child compared to adult faces. His findings suggested that “face processing abilities of adolescents with ASD may be influenced by experience with specific categories of stimuli, similar to their typically developing peers” ( 28 ). Therefore, we hypothesized that children with ASD would show greater performance in recognizing facial emotions of individuals having the same age range and that the assessment of facial emotion recognition could vary according to the age range of the model presented to the child.…”