Risk and Trust Exploring Multimodal Social-Emotional Behaviors in Autism Spectrum Disorders An

Abstract—The purpose of this paper is to present our original and multidisciplinary approach to study multimodal socialemotional behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorders. Our goal is to conduct fundamental and applied research regarding the reception and production of social signals involved in human interactions. To achieve this aim, we try to understand and model cognitive and multimodal emotional integration (e.g., auditory, visual, postural) during infancy and to analyze dysfunctions in pathologies that affect the dynamics of social interactions such as autism spectrum disorders. More specifically, we study the characterization of multimodal socialemotional signals (speech, prosody, faces, postures) and the dynamics of communication (e.g., synchrony, engagement). The fields of application covered are the improvement of differential diagnosis, interactive robotics, assisting people with autism spectrum disorders and their caregivers, and objectification in psychopathology. [3]. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a group of behaviorally defined disorders with abnormalities or impaired development in three areas: verbal and nonverbal communication, social interaction, and rigid patterns of behavior, present in early childhood [4]. Several subtypes have been defined including autistic disorder (AD), pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), Asperger syndrome and Rett syndrome. In this paper we focus more specifically on three domains of impairments: i) language, ii) emotion and iii) synchrony in social interactions