The processing of facial expressions of emotions by 23 adults with Down syndrome and moderate intellectual disability was compared with that of adults with intellectual disability of other etiologies (24 matched in cognitive level and 26 with mild intellectual disability). Each participant performed 4 tasks of the Florida Affect Battery and an…

This study investigated the ability of adults with Asperger syndrome to recognize emotional categories of facial expressions and emotional prosodies with graded emotional intensities. The individuals with Asperger syndrome showed poorer recognition performance for angry and sad expressions from both facial and vocal information. The group…

This study of 501 children and adults found that subjects with mental retardation or borderline intelligence were less proficient at identifying facial expressions of emotion than were children of average intelligence. Among individuals with mental retardation or borderline intelligence, recognition increased with intelligence quotient. Among…

To date, studies have not established whether autistic and non-autistic individuals differ in emotion recognition from facial motion cues when matched in terms of alexithymia. Here, autistic and non-autistic adults (N = 60) matched on age, gender, non-verbal reasoning ability and alexithymia, completed an emotion recognition task, which employed…

Research on facial expressions in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) has been conducted using photographs. Our goal was to examine the effect of motion on perception of emotional expressions. Adults with DS, adults with typical development matched for chronological age (CA), and children with typical development matched for developmental age (DA)…

Although the recognition of the affective experiences of peers is an important prerequisite for social adaptation, children's ability to recognize peers' facial displays of emotion remains unexamined. To investigate the degree to which young children were able to enact expressions of emotion that were recognizable by peers and adults, and to…

People with Williams syndrome are extremely sociable, empathic, and expressive in communication. Some researchers suggest they may be especially sensitive to perceiving emotional expressions. We administered the Faces and Paralanguage subtests of the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Scale (DANVA2), a standardized measure of emotion…

When face processing studies find sex differences, male infants appear better at face recognition than female infants, whereas female adults appear better at face recognition than male adults. Both female infants and adults, however, discriminate emotional expressions better than males. To investigate if sex and age differences in facial scanning…

Face processing and facial expression recognition was investigated in 17 adults with Down syndrome, and results were compared with those of a child control group matched for receptive vocabulary. On the tasks involving faces without emotional content, the adults with Down syndrome performed significantly worse than did the controls. However, their…

We frequently encounter groups of similar objects in our visual environment: a bed of flowers, a basket of oranges, a crowd of people. How does the visual system process such redundancy? Research shows that rather than code every element in a texture, the visual system favors a summary statistical representation of all the elements. The authors…

Our facial expressions give others the opportunity to access our feelings, and constitute an important nonverbal tool for communication. Many recent studies have investigated emotional perception in adults, and our knowledge of neural processes involved in emotions is increasingly precise. Young children also use faces to express their internal…

The purpose of this study was to trace the development of children's understanding of emotions between the ages of 4 and 12. Twenty-four children at each of five age groups (4, 6, 8, 10, and 12), equally divided by sex, served as subjects. Three groups of tasks were administered: (1) the recognition of facial expressions from photographs, (2) the…

In a study of 86 individuals with mental retardation, participants were asked to identify the appropriate facial expression or word that corresponded to the emotional response in a vignette. Results indicated that age correlated negatively with choosing the right word or picture. IQ was a significant predictor of performance. (CR)