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Facial Imitation Improves Emotion Recognition in Adults with Different Levels of Sub-Clinical Autistic Traits

We used computer-based automatic expression analysis to investigate the impact of imitation on facial emotion recognition with a baseline-intervention-retest design. The participants: 55 young adults with varying degrees of autistic traits, completed an emotion recognition task with images of faces...

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Autores principales: Kowallik, Andrea E., Pohl, Maike, Schweinberger, Stefan R.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7838766/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33450891
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9010004
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author Kowallik, Andrea E.
Pohl, Maike
Schweinberger, Stefan R.
author_facet Kowallik, Andrea E.
Pohl, Maike
Schweinberger, Stefan R.
author_sort Kowallik, Andrea E.
collection PubMed
description We used computer-based automatic expression analysis to investigate the impact of imitation on facial emotion recognition with a baseline-intervention-retest design. The participants: 55 young adults with varying degrees of autistic traits, completed an emotion recognition task with images of faces displaying one of six basic emotional expressions. This task was then repeated with instructions to imitate the expressions. During the experiment, a camera captured the participants’ faces for an automatic evaluation of their imitation performance. The instruction to imitate enhanced imitation performance as well as emotion recognition. Of relevance, emotion recognition improvements in the imitation block were larger in people with higher levels of autistic traits, whereas imitation enhancements were independent of autistic traits. The finding that an imitation instruction improves emotion recognition, and that imitation is a positive within-participant predictor of recognition accuracy in the imitation block supports the idea of a link between motor expression and perception in the processing of emotions, which might be mediated by the mirror neuron system. However, because there was no evidence that people with higher autistic traits differ in their imitative behavior per se, their disproportional emotion recognition benefits could have arisen from indirect effects of imitation instructions
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spelling pubmed-78387662021-01-28 Facial Imitation Improves Emotion Recognition in Adults with Different Levels of Sub-Clinical Autistic Traits Kowallik, Andrea E. Pohl, Maike Schweinberger, Stefan R. J Intell Article We used computer-based automatic expression analysis to investigate the impact of imitation on facial emotion recognition with a baseline-intervention-retest design. The participants: 55 young adults with varying degrees of autistic traits, completed an emotion recognition task with images of faces displaying one of six basic emotional expressions. This task was then repeated with instructions to imitate the expressions. During the experiment, a camera captured the participants’ faces for an automatic evaluation of their imitation performance. The instruction to imitate enhanced imitation performance as well as emotion recognition. Of relevance, emotion recognition improvements in the imitation block were larger in people with higher levels of autistic traits, whereas imitation enhancements were independent of autistic traits. The finding that an imitation instruction improves emotion recognition, and that imitation is a positive within-participant predictor of recognition accuracy in the imitation block supports the idea of a link between motor expression and perception in the processing of emotions, which might be mediated by the mirror neuron system. However, because there was no evidence that people with higher autistic traits differ in their imitative behavior per se, their disproportional emotion recognition benefits could have arisen from indirect effects of imitation instructions MDPI 2021-01-13 /pmc/articles/PMC7838766/ /pubmed/33450891 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9010004 Text en © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Kowallik, Andrea E.
Pohl, Maike
Schweinberger, Stefan R.
Facial Imitation Improves Emotion Recognition in Adults with Different Levels of Sub-Clinical Autistic Traits
title Facial Imitation Improves Emotion Recognition in Adults with Different Levels of Sub-Clinical Autistic Traits
title_full Facial Imitation Improves Emotion Recognition in Adults with Different Levels of Sub-Clinical Autistic Traits
title_fullStr Facial Imitation Improves Emotion Recognition in Adults with Different Levels of Sub-Clinical Autistic Traits
title_full_unstemmed Facial Imitation Improves Emotion Recognition in Adults with Different Levels of Sub-Clinical Autistic Traits
title_short Facial Imitation Improves Emotion Recognition in Adults with Different Levels of Sub-Clinical Autistic Traits
title_sort facial imitation improves emotion recognition in adults with different levels of sub-clinical autistic traits
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7838766/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33450891
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9010004
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