Examining the bidirectional association between emotion recognition and social autistic traits using observational and genetic analyses

Abstract

Background: There is mixed evidence for an association between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and emotion recognition deficits. We sought to assess the bidirectionality of this association using phenotypic and genetic data in a large community sample. Methods: Analyses were conducted in three stages. First, we examined the bidirectional association between social autistic traits at age 8 years and emotion recognition task (ERT) responses at age 24 years (Study 1; N = 3,562); and between Diagnostic Analysis of Non-Verbal Accuracy (DANVA) emotion recognition responses at age 8 years and social autistic traits at age 10 years (Study 2; N = 9,071). Next, we used genetic analyses (Study 3) to examine the association between polygenic risk scores for ASD and outcomes for the ERT and DANVA. The genetic correlation between ASD and ERT responses at age 24 was also estimated. Analyses were conducted in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Results: Social autistic traits at age 8 years were negatively associated with later total correct responses on ERT in Study 1 (b = À0.18; 95% CI: À0.27 to À0.09). We also found evidence of an association in Study 2 (b = À0.04; 95% CI: À0.05 to À0.03). We found the opposite association, that is positive, between the ASD polygenic risk score and ERT (b = 0.40; 95% CI: 0.10 to 0.70); however, this association varied across different p-value thresholds and would not survive multiple testing, so should be interpreted with caution. We did not find evidence of a genetic correlation between ASD and ERT. Conclusion: We found an observational association between poorer emotion recognition and increased social autistic traits. Our genetic analyses may suggest a shared genetic aetiology between these or a potential causal pathway; however, future research would benefit from using better powered GWAS to examine this further. Our results may inform interventions targeting emotion recognition.

How early can an upcoming critical transition be detected?

“…These results strongly support the use of a consecutive point strategy as suggested by Clements et al . [32, 37]. We found that the original two-consecutive point strategy is insufficient for reducing the false positive rate with a more realistic null dataset.…”

“…An adaptation of the methodology was included in [33] using an indicator function which depends on the time-series trend of each EWS. In this research, taking the negation of EWSs which are expected to decline prior to the tipping point was found to result in a more robust method than taking the positive summation of all EWSs [33, 37]. The trend of an EWS can depend on the type of data used [3] and hence it is important to first analyse each complex system analytically to determine the trend of each EWS, before applying the indicator adaption.…”

“…A consecutive signal approach has previously been suggested with the 2-sigma composite method and evidence showed that using only two consecutive points is sufficient for reducing the number of false identifications [32, 37]. However, an analysis on the “best” number of consecutive points has not been conducted.…”

Emotional dysregulation in childhood and disordered eating and self-harm in adolescence: Prospective associations and mediating pathways

“…Emotion recognition was measured using the Diagnostic Assessment of Non-Verbal Accuracy (Nowicki & Duke, 1994) at mean age 8 years 8 months. We used the total number of facial emotions incorrectly identified (Reed et al, 2021). For bullying victimisation, we used the summed score of bullying behaviours (Table S3) reported by participants at mean age 12 years 10 months on the Bullying and Friendship Emotion dysregulation, disordered eating, and self-harm 8 Interview Schedule (Wolke, Woods, Stanford, & Schulz, 2001).…”

Assessing the effectiveness of online emotion recognition training in healthy volunteers

“…For example, poorer emotion recognition has been found in individuals with depression (Dalili et al, 2015; Demenescu et al, 2010), and this may be a causal factor in the maintenance of depressive symptoms (Warren et al, 2015). Similarly, autistic individuals or those scoring higher on autistic trait measures tend to have lower accuracy for global emotion recognition (Law Smith et al, 2010; Lozier et al, 2014; Reed et al, 2021). This may have implications for social development and interpersonal skills over time (Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013).…”