title: Processing of stimulus content but not of emotional valence is altered in persons with Williams syndrome.
abstract: Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) exhibit hypersociability and may respond atypically to emotional information in social and nonsocial stimuli. It is not yet clear whether these difficulties are specific to emotional content or stimulus type. This study examined the neural processes supporting social and emotional information processing in WS.
  
  
  
  Visual event-related potentials were recorded in 19 adults with WS and 10 typical peers during a picture-viewing task requiring detection of smiling faces among other social and nonsocial images with positive and negative emotional content.
  
  
  
  The participant groups were not significantly different in affective processing of positive and negative stimuli and perceived faces as different from nonsocial images. Participants with WS showed subtle differences in face-specific perceptual processes (e.g. face inversion, N170 lateralisation), suggesting a more feature-based processing. They also demonstrated reduced attention and arousal modulation (P3, late positive potential) in response to faces vs. nonsocial images. These differences were independent of intelligence quotient.
  
  
  
  There was no evidence of greater than typical perceptual, attentional or affective processing of social information in WS. The results support the idea that altered face perception processes and not the increased salience of social stimuli or difficulties with emotion discrimination may contribute to the hypersocial phenotype in WS.
authors.affiliation: Vanderbilt Kennedy Center & Dept. of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA. sasha.key@vanderbilt.edu.
authors.forename: A P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Key
authors.affiliation: Vanderbilt Kennedy Center & Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
authors.forename: E M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Dykens
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012938:Social Perception; D018980:Williams Syndrome / Q000503:physiopathology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: ERP; Williams syndrome; attention; emotion; face; nonsocial