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Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores

Emotion perception is essential for successful social interactions and maintaining long-term relationships with friends and family. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience social communication deficits and have reported difficulties in facial expression recognition. However, emoti...

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Autores principales: Ortega, Jefferson, Chen, Zhimin, Whitney, David
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10198990/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37208368
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-35371-6
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author Ortega, Jefferson
Chen, Zhimin
Whitney, David
author_facet Ortega, Jefferson
Chen, Zhimin
Whitney, David
author_sort Ortega, Jefferson
collection PubMed
description Emotion perception is essential for successful social interactions and maintaining long-term relationships with friends and family. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience social communication deficits and have reported difficulties in facial expression recognition. However, emotion recognition depends on more than just processing face expression; context is critically important to correctly infer the emotions of others. Whether context-based emotion processing is impacted in those with Autism remains unclear. Here, we used a recently developed context-based emotion perception task, called Inferential Emotion Tracking (IET), and investigated whether individuals who scored high on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) had deficits in context-based emotion perception. Using 34 videos (including Hollywood movies, home videos, and documentaries), we tested 102 participants as they continuously tracked the affect (valence and arousal) of a blurred-out, invisible character. We found that individual differences in Autism Quotient scores were more strongly correlated with IET task accuracy than they are with traditional face emotion perception tasks. This correlation remained significant even when controlling for potential covarying factors, general intelligence, and performance on traditional face perception tasks. These findings suggest that individuals with ASD may have impaired perception of contextual information, it reveals the importance of developing ecologically relevant emotion perception tasks in order to better assess and treat ASD, and it provides a new direction for further research on context-based emotion perception deficits in ASD.
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spelling pubmed-101989902023-05-21 Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores Ortega, Jefferson Chen, Zhimin Whitney, David Sci Rep Article Emotion perception is essential for successful social interactions and maintaining long-term relationships with friends and family. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience social communication deficits and have reported difficulties in facial expression recognition. However, emotion recognition depends on more than just processing face expression; context is critically important to correctly infer the emotions of others. Whether context-based emotion processing is impacted in those with Autism remains unclear. Here, we used a recently developed context-based emotion perception task, called Inferential Emotion Tracking (IET), and investigated whether individuals who scored high on the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) had deficits in context-based emotion perception. Using 34 videos (including Hollywood movies, home videos, and documentaries), we tested 102 participants as they continuously tracked the affect (valence and arousal) of a blurred-out, invisible character. We found that individual differences in Autism Quotient scores were more strongly correlated with IET task accuracy than they are with traditional face emotion perception tasks. This correlation remained significant even when controlling for potential covarying factors, general intelligence, and performance on traditional face perception tasks. These findings suggest that individuals with ASD may have impaired perception of contextual information, it reveals the importance of developing ecologically relevant emotion perception tasks in order to better assess and treat ASD, and it provides a new direction for further research on context-based emotion perception deficits in ASD. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-05-19 /pmc/articles/PMC10198990/ /pubmed/37208368 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-35371-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Ortega, Jefferson
Chen, Zhimin
Whitney, David
Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores
title Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores
title_full Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores
title_fullStr Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores
title_full_unstemmed Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores
title_short Inferential Emotion Tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high Autism Quotient scores
title_sort inferential emotion tracking reveals impaired context-based emotion processing in individuals with high autism quotient scores
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10198990/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37208368
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-35371-6
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