Investigating implicit emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder across age groups: A cross-modal emotional priming study

Florence Y. N. Leung, Vesna Stojanovik, Cunmei Jiang, Fang Liu

 Cumulating evidence suggests that atypical emotion processing in autism may generalize across different stimulus domains. However, this evidence comes from studies examining explicit emotion recognition. It remains unclear whether domain-general atypicality also applies to implicit emotion processing in autism and its implication for real-world social communication. To investigate this, we employed a novel cross-modal emotional priming task to assess implicit emotion processing of spoken/sung words (primes) through their influence on subsequent emotional judgment of faces/face-like objects (targets). We assessed whether implicit emotional priming differed between 38 autistic and 38 neurotypical individuals across age groups as a function of prime and target type. Results indicated no overall group differences across age groups, prime types, and target types. However, differential, domain-specific developmental patterns emerged for the autism and neurotypical groups. For neurotypical individuals, speech but not song primed the emotional judgment of faces across ages. This speech-orienting tendency was not observed across ages in the autism group, as priming of speech on faces was not seen in autistic adults. These results outline the importance of the delicate weighting between speech- versus song-orientation in implicit emotion processing throughout development, providing more nuanced insights into the emotion processing profile of autistic individuals.

不断积累的证据表明，自闭症患者的非典型情绪处理可能会在不同的刺激领域普遍存在。然而，这些证据来自于对显性情绪识别的研究。至于自闭症患者的内隐情绪处理是否也会出现领域泛化的不典型性及其对现实世界社交沟通的影响，目前仍不清楚。为了探究这个问题，我们采用了一种新颖的跨模态情绪引物任务，通过影响随后对人脸/类似人脸的物体（目标）的情绪判断，来评估口语/唱歌词（引物）的内隐情绪加工。我们评估了不同年龄组的 38 名自闭症患者和 38 名神经畸形患者的内隐情绪引物是否因引物和目标物类型而有所不同。结果表明，不同年龄组、素材类型和目标类型之间没有整体的群体差异。然而，自闭症群体和神经症群体出现了不同的、特定领域的发展模式。对于神经症患者来说，在不同年龄段，语音而非歌曲会引发对人脸的情感判断。在自闭症群体中，不同年龄段的人并没有观察到这种语音导向的倾向，因为在自闭症成人中没有看到语音对人脸的引导作用。这些结果概述了在整个发育过程中，内隐情绪处理中语音导向与歌曲导向之间微妙权重的重要性，从而为了解自闭症患者的情绪处理特征提供了更细致入微的见解。