Rapid neural categorization of angry and fearful faces is specifically impaired in boys with autism spectrum disorder

• Published in: Journal of child psychology and psychiatry Vol. 61; no. 9; pp. 1019 - 1029
• Main Authors: Van der Donck, Stephanie, Dzhelyova, Milena, Vettori, Sofie, Mahdi, Soha Sadat, Claes, Peter, Steyaert, Jean, Boets, Bart
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.09.2020; John Wiley and Sons Inc
• Subjects: Anger; Autism; Autism Spectrum Disorder - physiopathology; Autism Spectrum Disorder - psychology; Autism Spectrum Disorders; Autistic children; Boys; Child; Child & adolescent psychiatry; Classification; Clinical Diagnosis; Electroencephalography; facial emotion processing; Facial Expression; Facial expressions; Facial Recognition; fast periodic visual stimulation; Fear; Humans; implicit expression detection; Male; Males; Measurement; Medical diagnosis; Original; Sequences; Stimulation; Autism; electroencephalography; implicit expression detection; facial emotion processing; fast periodic visual stimulation
• ISSN: 0021-9630; 1469-7610; 1469-7610
• DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.13201

Background Difficulties with facial expression processing may be associated with the characteristic social impairments in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Emotional face processing in ASD has been investigated in an abundance of behavioral and EEG studies, yielding, however, mixed and inconsistent results. Methods We combined fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) with EEG to assess the neural sensitivity to implicitly detect briefly presented facial expressions among a stream of neutral faces, in 23 boys with ASD and 23 matched typically developing (TD) boys. Neutral faces with different identities were presented at 6 Hz, periodically interleaved with an expressive face (angry, fearful, happy, sad in separate sequences) every fifth image (i.e., 1.2 Hz oddball frequency). These distinguishable frequency tags for neutral and expressive stimuli allowed direct and objective quantification of the expression‐categorization responses, needing only four sequences of 60 s of recording per condition. Results Both groups show equal neural synchronization to the general face stimulation and similar neural responses to happy and sad faces. However, the ASD group displays significantly reduced responses to angry and fearful faces, compared to TD boys. At the individual subject level, these neural responses allow to predict membership of the ASD group with an accuracy of 87%. Whereas TD participants show a significantly lower sensitivity to sad faces than to the other expressions, ASD participants show an equally low sensitivity to all the expressions. Conclusions Our results indicate an emotion‐specific processing deficit, instead of a general emotion‐processing problem: Boys with ASD are less sensitive than TD boys to rapidly and implicitly detect angry and fearful faces. The implicit, fast, and straightforward nature of FPVS‐EEG opens new perspectives for clinical diagnosis.