title: Emotion recognition in children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders.
abstract: There is a limited amount of research that examines social-emotional functioning in children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), and the majority of it relies on parent and teacher reports of social impairments. Because these provide broad measures of social function, they fail to elucidate the underlying specific skills with which this group of children has difficulty. The current study examines emotion-recognition abilities in children with FASD, as it plays a central role in social interaction. Participants were 22 children with diagnosed FASD (ages 8-14), and age- and gender-matched typically developing controls. Tasks included measures of emotion recognition from three nonlinguistic modalities: facial expressions, emotional tone of voice, and body positioning and movement. Participant's parents completed measures of adaptive and behavioral function that were related to children's performance on aspects of emotion recognition. Overall, the results show that children with FASD have more difficulties with emotion recognition than typically developing age-matched peers, but these difficulties may not be clinically significant (e.g., smaller effect size) or may be specific to the age of the individual exhibiting the emotion (i.e., child vs. adult). These results are discussed in the context of previous studies.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of Victoria , Victoria , British Columbia , Canada.
authors.forename: Kimberly A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Kerns
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of Victoria , Victoria , British Columbia , Canada.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Siklos
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of Victoria , Victoria , British Columbia , Canada.
authors.forename: Lesley
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Baker
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , University of Victoria , Victoria , British Columbia , Canada.
authors.forename: Ulrich
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Müller
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D063647:Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010290:Parents; D056888:Patient Positioning; D011247:Pregnancy; D012919:Social Behavior
keywords: Emotion recognition; Facial recognition; Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders; Prenatal alcohol exposure; Social cognition; Social-information processing