The Effect Of Facial Stimulus Characteristics On Facial Expression Recognition In Autism

Defects of autism mainly lie in the lack of nonverbal behavior for social interaction, such as eye contact, facial expression and body posture and so on. Facial expression is an important medium for human transferring emotional messages and facial emotion recognition ability is necessary for individual understanding the social environment in a right and complete way. Therefore, facial expression recognition deficits seriously affect the autisms’interpersonal and social interaction. Based on Gepner’s Rapid visual-motion integration deficit theory for autism and Nuske’s Association model between domain-general processes and specific emotion processes, this study designs two experiments respectively from showing different speeds and intensity of facial expression, to explore the impact of facial expression characteristics on the facial expression recognition in autism.In experiment1, different intensity of emotional face stimulus were presented, to explore the influence of different emotion intensity and emotion types on facial expression recognition of autism. Results shows that main effect of subject type is significant and the react time in typically development group is significantly less than autism group. This suggests that autistic individual has certain disorders on facial expressions recognition; Results also indicates that main effect of emotion type is significant, and individual’s response to happy expression recognition is significantly less than the recognition of angry expressions; Repeated measurement ANOVAs results shows that the strength of the facial expression main effect is significant, and100%intensity expression recognition reaction time is less than50%intensity expression recognition significantly.In experiment2, different speeds of face emotional stimulus were presented to individuals, to explore the effects of emotional rendering speeds and different types of autism on facial expression recognition. Results shows that for the facial expression recognition reaction to three different speeds of emotional rendering, both autism group and typically development group are significantly different, the level of which is as high as0.001. After multiple comparisons, there are significant differences in both600ms-1800ms and1200ms-1800ms. And the recognition of facial expressions of1800ms is significantly faster than600ms and1200ms rendering speeds. In other words, the slower emotional facial speeds rendering, the better facial expression recognition for the autism group.Finally, we discussed the shortcomings of this study from the research methods and the ecological validity of stimulus material. The future research direction, theoretical significance and practical significance of the study are also discussed.