Search

The angry superiority effect refers to more efficient way individuals detect angry relative to happy faces in a crowd. Given their socio-emotional deficits, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may be impervious to this effect. Thirty children with ASD and 30 matched-typically developing children were presented with a visual search task, in which they were to detect a happy or angry target face in a crowd. A significant angry superiority effect was found for children with and without ASD. Results are discussed in light of perceptual, cognitive and social mechanisms underlying this effect in children with ASD. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

Several studies suggest that children with ADHD tend to perform worse than typically developing children on emotion recognition tasks. However, most of these studies have focused on the recognition of facial expression, while there is evidence that context plays a major role on emotion perception. This study aims at further investigating emotion processing in children with ADHD, by assessing not only facial emotion recognition (Experiment 1) but also emotion recognition on the basis of contextual cues (Experiment 2). Twenty-seven children and adolescents with ADHD were compared to age-matched typically developing controls. Importantly, findings of this study show that emotion-processing difficulties in children with ADHD extend beyond facial emotion and also affect the recognition of emotions on the basis of contextual information. Our data thus indicate that children with ADHD have an overall emotion-processing deficit.

The aim of the present study was to determine whether children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are able to recognize facial expressions of emotion and objects missing on the basis of contextual cues. While most of these studies focused on facial emotion recognition, here we examined the ability to extract emotional information on the basis contextual cues. Nineteen children and adolescents with ASD were asked to recognize emotions and objects (control condition) masked within visual scenes and their performance was compared to that of 19 typically developing controls matched on chronological age and gender. Results revealed that children with ASD were able to use contextual cues to recognize objects but not emotions. Findings of this study are discussed within the framework of specific emotional processing deficits in ASD. (Contains 1 figure.)

It is widely accepted that autistic children experience difficulties in processing and recognizing emotions. Most relevant studies have explored the perception of faces. However, context and bodily gestures are also sources from which we derive emotional meanings. We tested 23 autistic children and 23 typically developing control children on their ability to recognize point-light displays of a person's actions, subjective states and emotions. In a control task, children had to recognize point-light displays of everyday objects. The children with autism only differed from the control children in their ability to name the emotional point-light displays. This suggests that children with autism can extract complex meanings from bodily movements but may be less sensitive to higher-order emotional information conveyed by human movement. The results are discussed in the context of a specific deficit in emotion perception in children with autism. (Contains 1 table, and 1 figure, and 2 notes.)

Although it is commonly accepted that dyslexic children have auditory phonological deficits, the precise nature of these deficits remains unclear. This study examines potential pitch processing deficit in dyslexic children, and recovery after specific training, by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioural responses to pitch manipulations within natural speech. In two experimental sessions, separated by 6 weeks of training, 10 dyslexic children, aged 9-12, were compared to reading age-matched controls, using sentences from children's books. The pitch of the sentence's final words was parametrically manipulated (either congruous, weakly or strongly incongruous). While dyslexics followed a training focused on phonological awareness and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, controls followed a non-auditory training. Before training, controls outperformed dyslexic children in the detection of the strong pitch incongruity. Moreover, while strong pitch incongruities were associated with increased late positivity (P300 component) in controls, no such pattern was found in dyslexics. Most importantly, pitch discrimination performance was significantly improved, and the amplitude of the late positivity to the strong pitch incongruity enhanced, for dyslexics after a relatively brief period of training, so that their pattern of response more closely resemble those of controls. (Contains 4 tables and 5 figures.)

In order to study the effect of cooperative and opposition games in children interactions, 10 preschool children (5 to 6 year olds) were monitored over a 1-month period: the interactions between peers were quantified and analyzed in different games, through Social Network Analysis. Results suggest a significant correlation between a cooperative environment and a more connected and balanced passing network, less dependent on a given player, more focused on the goal at task. This research indicates that a cooperative environment can optimize and enhance the interactions between children, creating a stronger, more functional and more connected network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current study, typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were presented with a facial-feature discrimination task including both real and cartoon faces, displayed either upright or inverted. Results demonstrated that typically developing children were more accurate at discriminating facial features from upright than from inverted faces and that this effect was specific to real faces. By contrast, children with ASD failed to show such a specific pattern of performance for processing facial features displayed in real faces. Findings of the current study suggest that face type (real vs. cartoon) does not affect perceptual ability in children with ASD as it does in typically developing children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]