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. 2023 Oct-Dec;23(4):100399.
doi: 10.1016/j.ijchp.2023.100399. Epub 2023 Jul 25.

Diminished emotion recognition with reduced face gaze in complex situation in individuals with broad autism phenotype

Woo-Jin Cha  1 , Kiho Kim  2
Affiliations

Diminished emotion recognition with reduced face gaze in complex situation in individuals with broad autism phenotype

Woo-Jin Cha et al. Int J Clin Health Psychol. 2023 Oct-Dec.

Abstract

Background/objective: Individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP) showed a diminished ability to recognize emotion. This study aims to examine whether their decline in emotion recognition ability could be more clearly identified as task complexity increased and whether their decline could be influenced by their eye-gaze patterns.

Method: 41 individuals with BAP and 40 healthy controls performed two types of emotion recognition tasks. After confirming conditions wherein the BAP group did not perform well compared to the control group, we compared gaze proportion on faces and context between groups when performing the conditions.

Results: The more difficult the task, the clearer the significant relationships between the level of autistic traits and emotion recognition ability. The BAP group showed lower accuracy compared to the control group when a face with mild emotional intensity was presented with context. In terms of gaze proportion, the BAP group looked less at faces when recognizing emotions compared to the control group.

Conclusion: These findings indicate that diminished emotion recognition ability in individuals with BAP may be influenced by face gaze.

Keywords: Autism spectrum disorder; Broad autism phenotype; Emotion recognition; Eye-tracking; Weak central coherence theory.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig. 1
Correlation heatmap between ability to recognize emotions and autistic traits. P1: Phase 1 (emotion recognition task); P2: Phase 2 (emotions in context task); con: congruent condition; incon: incongruent condition. *p < .05. **p < .01.
Fig 2
Fig. 2
Comparison of accuracy between groups under the condition of intensity of emotion in congruent and incongruent conditions of ECT. BAP, broad autism phenotype group; Control, control group. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
Fig 3
Fig. 3
Comparison of gaze proportion between groups under the condition of mild emotional intensity in congruent and incongruent conditions of ECT. BAP, broad autism phenotype group; Control, control group. **p < .01.
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