Investigating implicit emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder across age groups: a cross-modal emotional priming study

Leung, F. Y. N., Stojanovik, V. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6791-9968, Jiang, C. and Liu, F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7776-0222 (2024) Investigating implicit emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder across age groups: a cross-modal emotional priming study. Autism Research. ISSN 1939-3806 doi: 10.1002/aur.3124

Abstract/Summary

Cumulating evidence suggests that atypical emotion processing in autism may generalise across different stimulus domains. However, this evidence comes from studies examining explicit emotion recognition. It remains unclear whether domain-general atypicality also applies to implicit) emotion processing in autism and its implication for real-world social communication. To investigate this, we employed a novel cross-modal emotional priming task to assess implicit emotion processing of spoken/sung words (primes) through their influence on subsequent emotional judgment of faces/face-like objects (targets). We assessed whether implicit emotional priming differed between 38 autistic and 38 neurotypical individuals across age groups as a function of prime and target type. Results indicated no overall group differences across age groups, prime types, and target types. However, differential, domain-specific developmental patterns emerged for the autism and neurotypical groups. For neurotypical individuals, speech but not song primed the emotional judgment of faces across ages. This speech-orienting tendency was not observed across ages in the autism group, as priming of speech on faces was not seen in autistic adults. These results outline the importance of the delicate weighting between speech- versus song-orientation in implicit emotion processing throughout development, providing more nuanced insights into the emotion processing profile of autistic individuals.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/115630
Identification Number/DOI	10.1002/aur.3124
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN) Interdisciplinary centres and themes > ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders) Research Network Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Development Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Perception and Action Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Social
Publisher	Wiley
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