Social-perceptual abilities in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome

People with Williams syndrome (WMS) have a unique social phenotype characterised by unusually strong interest in other people and an engaging and empathic personality. Two experiments were designed to test whether this phenotype is associated with relatively spared abilities to decode mental-state information from nonverbal cues. The first experiment involved a modified version of the revised Eyes Test. The second experiment probed the ability to label emotions from brief dynamic facial displays. Adolescents and adults with WMS were compared to age-, IQ-, and language-matched participants with learning/intellectual disabilities, and age-matched normal controls. In both experiments the WMS group performed at a significantly lower level than the normal controls, and no different from the well-matched comparison-group with intellectual dis-abilities. These findings, contradicting earlier reports in the literature, argue against the view that in WMS social-perceptual abilities are relatively spared and can explain the social profile associated with this neurodevelopmental disorder. Research with people with Williams syndrome (WMS) has surged in the last 15 years, yet the scientific literature is marked by the persistence of apparently contradictory claims, especially with respect to the social skills and language abil-ities of this population. Given the rarity of this genetic syndrome, many studies have reported results based on small samples, with participants spanning a wide age range, and variability in performance has been often overlooked in inter-preting empirical results. At the outset, interest in the syndrome was sparked by case studies of unusual social and linguistic behaviour (e.g.