title: Facial trustworthiness judgments in children with ASD are modulated by happy and angry emotional cues.
abstract: Appearance-based trustworthiness inferences may reflect the misinterpretation of emotional expression cues. Children and adults typically perceive faces that look happy to be relatively trustworthy and those that look angry to be relatively untrustworthy. Given reports of atypical expression perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the current study aimed to determine whether the modulation of trustworthiness judgments by emotional expression cues in children with ASD is also atypical. Cognitively-able children with and without ASD, aged 6-12 years, rated the trustworthiness of faces showing happy, angry and neutral expressions. Trust judgments in children with ASD were significantly modulated by overt happy and angry expressions, like those of typically-developing children. Furthermore, subtle emotion cues in neutral faces also influenced trust ratings of the children in both groups. These findings support a powerful influence of emotion cues on perceived trustworthiness, which even extends to children with social cognitive impairments.
authors.affiliation: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia.
authors.forename: Frances
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Caulfield
authors.affiliation: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia.
authors.forename: Louise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ewing
authors.affiliation: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia.
authors.forename: Nichola
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Burton
authors.affiliation: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia.
authors.forename: Eleni
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Avard
authors.affiliation: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia.
authors.forename: Gillian
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rhodes
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger; D002648:Child; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D003071:Cognition; D003463:Cues; D005149:Facial Expression; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D035502:Trust