Impairments in decoding facial and vocal emotional expressions in high functioning autistic adults and adolescents

The present investigation shows that gender of stimuli, age, and emotional categories affects the ability of adults and adolescent with Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC) to decode facial and vocal emotional expressions. A total of 60 subjects participated to the research: 15 ASC and 15 control adolescents aged between 10-14 years; and 15 ASC and 15 control young adults aged between 20-24 years. Their tasks consisted in decoding: a) 24 adults and 24 children contemporary facial emotional expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust; and b) 20 adult's vocal emotional expressions of the same abovementioned emotions (except disgust). Significant differences were observed between ASC and typically developed peers. The data suggest that gender, type (voices or faces) of stimuli, and participants' age affect the emotion recognition process making difficult the definition of a common and shared pattern of emotional expression's recognition compliance among autistic and control groups. These results suggest that efficient and effective e-health technologies need to be able to learn and adapt to user individual traits and subjective needs to offer personalized assistance and support.