Parents’ impaired emotion recognition abilities are related to children’s autistic symptoms in autism spectrum disorder

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to explore whether parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) had impaired emotion recognition abilities and whether this deficit was related to their children’s autistic symptoms. METHODS: The autistic symptoms of 31 ASD children were assessed using the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R). Fifty parents of ASD children and 34 parents of typically developing (TD) children completed an emotion recognition task (ERT). RESULTS: The numbers of correct ERT responses were lower for parents of ASD children than for parents of TD children with respect to recognizing sadness, disgust, fear, and all emotions (P=0.01, 0.04, 0.02, and 0.00, respectively). Controlled for parental age, gender, and the intelligence quotients of both the parents and children, a negative correlation was found between the total number of correct ERT responses for parents of ASD children and these children’s “restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior” scores on the ADI-R (r=−0.32; P=0.03). CONCLUSION: Parents of ASD children showed impaired emotion recognition abilities compared with parents of TD children. This parental deficit in emotion recognition ability was related to the autistic symptoms of ASD children.