Multimodal emotion processing in autism spectrum disorders: an event-related potential study

Abstract

This study sought to describe heterogeneity in emotion processing in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) via electrophysiological markers of perceptual and cognitive processes that underpin emotion recognition across perceptual modalities. Behavioral and neural indicators of emotion processing were collected, as event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while youth with ASD completed a standardized facial and vocal emotion identification task. Children with ASD exhibited impaired emotion recognition performance for adult faces and child voices, with a subgroup displaying intact recognition. Latencies of early perceptual ERP components, marking social information processing speed, and amplitudes of subsequent components reflecting emotion evaluation, each correlated across modalities. Social information processing speed correlated with emotion recognition performance, and predicted membership in a subgroup with intact adult vocal emotion recognition. Results indicate that the essential multimodality of emotion recognition in individuals with ASDs may derive from early social information processing speed, despite heterogeneous behavioral performance; this process represents a novel social-emotional intervention target for ASD.

Fig. 1

Grand averaged ERP waveforms to faces: (A) N170 (peak between 160 and 220ms) extracted from electrode PO4; (B) N250 (peak between 220 and 320ms) extracted from a composite of C4, F4, and FC2.

Fig. 2

Grand averaged ERP waveforms to voices. (A) P200 (peak between 180 and 220ms) and N300 (peak between 280 and 320ms) extracted from electrode Fz. (B) N100 (peak between 90 and 130ms) extracted from Cz.

Fig. 3

Correlation between central N100 latency to voices and posterior N170 latency to faces.