title: Can children with autism read emotions from the eyes? The eyes test revisited.
abstract: This study aimed to test two new, simplified tasks related to the eye-test, targeting children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing controls (TD). Test-1 assessed the recognition of emotion/mental states with displays using one word and two eye-pictures, whereas Test-2 presented displays using two words and one eye-picture. Black and white photographs of children were used as materials. A cross-cultural study (Caucasian/East-Asian) with adults was initially carried out to verify generalizability across different ethnic groups. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses were used to compare emotion recognition from the eyes in the two tests. Trajectories were constructed linking performance on both tests either to chronological age or to different measures of mental age (receptive vocabulary based on the BPVS, CARS or ASQ for the ASD group). Performance improved with chronological age in both the ASD and TD groups of children. However, performance in Test-1 was significantly superior in children with ASD, who showed delayed onset and slower rate of improvement than TD children in Test-2. In both the ASD and TD groups the lowest error rate was recorded for the item 'anger', suggesting that threat-detection cue mechanisms may be intact in autism. In general, all children showed good performance on our novel tests, thus making them good candidates for assessing younger children and those with lower general abilities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, School of Health and Education, Middlesex University, London, UK. Electronic address: f.franco@mdx.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Fabia
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Franco
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Kyoto University, Japan.
authors.forename: Shoji
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Itakura
authors.affiliation: University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Krystyna
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Pomorska
authors.affiliation: City University, London, UK.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Abramowski
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, School of Health and Education, Middlesex University, London, UK.
authors.forename: Kozue
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nikaido
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Human Development, Institute of Education, London, UK.
authors.forename: Dagmara
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Dimitriou
mesh_terms: D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004644:Emotions; D005123:Eye; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012938:Social Perception; D056345:Theory of Mind
keywords: ASD; Developmental disorders; Emotion recognition; Eye-test; Theory of mind (ToM)