Matching Emotions Across Visual and Auditory Modalities in Children with Autism

Previous literature suggests that children with autism display a difference in recognising emotions, typically showing a unique pattern of processing, which can appear as a deficit in emotion recognition ability. These studies tend to be unimodal, which makes conclusions as to the location of these differences difficult. The current study presents an attempt to determine where autistic people differ in the emotion recognition process, and whether a higher-level processing difference, or many distinct modality-specific lower-level differences are responsible for modulating performance. It also aims to unpack what other elements could influence performance, such as age and gender. This was tested by assessing the performance of autistic (N = 29) and typically developing children (N = 74) to label and match emotions presented both visually and audibly. The autistic group showed no general impairment for the tasks, but each task had unique, significant emotion specific differences, these cannot be explained fully by any single theory currently, suggesting multiple factors play a small but distinct role in the effect of autism on emotional recognition. Furthermore, the autistic group demonstrated a strong, significant correlation for task performance across modalities which was not found in the typically developing group, suggesting the presence of a higher-level processing difference, possibly caused by changes to the amygdala. No gender differences were observed in any task or group, but a nonsignificant effect of age was observed in the multimodal matching task only, suggesting a developmental delay. Future suggestions of research, limitations of the methodology, and the implications of these findings are discussed