Emotional Recognition Ability of Autistic Children 3 4

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to study the emotional recognition ability of children with autism. 
Popular clinical perception highlights autistic children's deficits in expression of emotion. Several 
studies have tested the hypothesis that people with autism are emotionally flat because they cannot 
understand emotional expressions and a current trend in research indicate conflicting results. The 
present study had adopted a control group design with 20 subjects in each group. Inclusion and 
exclusion criteria for the clinical group comprising of moderate to high functioning autistic children 
were specified. Each group was exposed to three conditions- schematic, still and dynamic, where the 
task was to identify the appropriate emotion in the picture/clip presented. Preliminary results indicate 
that though the average performance of the clinical group in identifying emotions was superior in 
schematic condition identifying followed by dynamic human clips, but they showed slight deficit when 
presented with still human pictures. Their performance was also significantly poor than the non
autistic children. These results suggest that emotion perception impairment is not likely to be the 
primary underlying deficit in autism. A finding to this effect has important implications for the 
diagnosis, classification, assessment and treatment intervention for autistic children. Further results 
are discussed in the paper along with directions for further research.