Effects of Emotional Music on Facial Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (original) (raw)
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Visual and music emotional processing in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. A controlled study.
2017
Music has been widely reported to have some beneficial features in various symptoms of the ASC. Communication and social skills, emotion recognition and Theory of Mind, knowledge acquisition, empathy and behavioural skills are listed among these improvements. In 2015, Matamoros conducted an experiment regarding ASD children, music therapy and emotion recognition in facial expressions. Her results have shed light to music therapy investigation by supporting her hypothesis that firstly with the support of music stimuli and then without it, emotion recognition skills would improve throughout time. In fact, by implementing more visual and auditory stimuli of different kinds to the exposure, this study attempts to investigate whether children with ASD have more difficulties to accurately recognise visual and music emotional stimuli or not.
Brain Sciences
The Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a difficulty in expressing and interpreting others’ emotions. In particular, people with ASD have difficulties when interpreting emotions encoded in facial expressions. In the past, music interventions have been shown to improve autistic individuals’ emotional and social skills. The present study describes a pilot study to explore the usefulness of music as a tool for improving autistic children’s emotion recognition in facial expressions. Twenty-five children (mean age = 8.8 y, SD = 1.24) with high-functioning ASD and normal hearing participated in the study consisting of four weekly sessions of 15 min each. Twenty-five participants were randomly divided into an experimental group (N = 14) and a control group (N = 11). During each session, participants in the experimental group were exposed to images of facial expressions for four emotions (happy, sad, angry, and fear). Images were shown in three conditions, with the second c...
Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2014
EMOTION PERCEPTION DEFICITS ARE COMMONLY observed in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Numerous studies have documented deficits in emotional recognition of social stimuli among those with ASD, such as faces and voices, while far fewer have investigated emotional recognition of nonsocial stimuli in this population. In this study, participants with ASD and a comparison group of typically developing (TD) control participants listened to song clips that varied in levels of pleasantness (valence) and arousal. Participants then rated emotions they felt or perceived in the music, using a list of eight emotion words for each song. Results showed that individuals with ASD gave significantly lower ratings of negative emotions in both the felt and perceived categories compared to TD controls, but did not show significant differences in ratings of positive emotions. These findings suggest that deficits in processing emotions in music among those with ASD may be valence specific.
Emotion Perception in Music in High-Functioning Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorders
2011
Abstract Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) succeed at a range of musical tasks. The ability to recognize musical emotion as belonging to one of four categories (happy, sad, scared or peaceful) was assessed in high-functioning adolescents with ASD (N= 26) and adolescents with typical development (TD, N= 26) with comparable performance IQ, auditory working memory, and musical training and experience.
It has been assumed that the social deficits inherent in autism imply that individuals with the condition will be unable fully to appreciate the emotional content of music. My aim was to test this assumption, and to explore more widely the similarities and differences between the experience of music in the normal population and those with autism. My first study used musically-induced mood changes and a behavioural measure to show that mood music has measurable effects on cognitive processes in a control group. The second study focused on high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum, using semi-structured interviews to investigate the part that music plays in their everyday lives, concluding that autism is no bar to a full appreciation of the emotional uses of music, though also suggesting a degree of impoverishment in the language they use to describe the emotions. The final set of experiments compared control and autism groups directly, using physiological (GSR) measures of arousal together with self-report of the emotions evoked by a set of musical items. Standardized questionnaires were employed to measure alexithymia (difficulty in identifying and describing feelings) in individuals. Although the autism group experienced comparable levels of physiological arousal to music, they used fewer words than controls to describe their emotional responses, a difference which correlated strongly with their level of alexithymia. My results are consistent with the hypothesis that in autism, the basic physiological and emotional component of their reactivity to music is functioning normally, but their ability to translate these reactions into conventional emotional language is reduced, in line with their degree of alexithymia. These results suggest that the preserved ability of music to generate emotional arousal in autism may lead to clinical applications for the treatment of alexithymia in autism and other conditions.
Music: a unique window into the world of autism
Understanding emotions is fundamental to our ability to navigate the complex world of human social interaction. Individualswith autism spectrum disorders(ASD) experience difficultieswith the communication and understanding of emotions within the social domain. Their ability to interpret other people’s nonverbal, facial, and bodily expressions of emotion is strongly curtailed. However, there is evidence to suggest that many individuals with ASD show a strong and early preference for music and are able to understand simple and complex musical emotions in childhood and adulthood. The dissociation between emotion recognition abilities in musical and social domains in individuals with ASD provides us with the opportunity to consider the nature of emotion processing difficulties characterizing this disorder. There has recently been a surge of interest in musical abilities in individuals with ASD, and this has motivated new behavioral and neuroimaging studies.Here, we review this new work.We conclude by providing some questions for future directions.
Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2014
Music is a potent source for eliciting emotions, but not everybody experience emotions in the same way. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show difficulties with social and emotional cognition. Impairments in emotion recognition are widely studied in ASD, and have been associated with atypical brain activation in response to emotional expressions in faces and speech. Whether these impairments and atypical brain responses generalize to other domains, such as emotional processing of music, is less clear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated neural correlates of emotion recognition in music in high-functioning adults with ASD and neurotypical adults. Both groups engaged similar neural networks during processing of emotional music, and individuals with ASD rated emotional music comparable to the group of neurotypical individuals. However, in the ASD group, increased activity in response to happy compared to sad music was observed in dorsolateral prefrontal regions and in the rolandic operculum/insula, and we propose that this reflects increased cognitive processing and physiological arousal in response to emotional musical stimuli in this group.
Background. Children with autistic spectrum disorders typically show impairments in processing affective information within social and interpersonal domains. It has yet to be established whether such difficulties persist in the area of music; a domain which is characteristically rich in emotional content. Methods. Fourteen children with autism and Asperger syndrome and their age and intelligence matched controls were tested for their ability to identify the affective connotations of melodies in the major or minor musical mode. They were required to match musical fragments with schematic representations of happy and sad faces. Results. The groups did not differ in their ability to ascribe the musical examples to the two affective categories. Conclusions. In contrast to their performance within social and interpersonal domains, children with autistic disorders showed no deficits in processing affect in musical stimuli.
Can children with autistic spectrum disorders perceive affect in music? An experimental …
Psychological Medicine, 1999
Background. Children with autistic spectrum disorders typically show impairments in processing affective information within social and interpersonal domains. It has yet to be established whether such difficulties persist in the area of music ; a domain which is characteristically rich in emotional content. Methods. Fourteen children with autism and Asperger syndrome and their age and intelligence matched controls were tested for their ability to identify the affective connotations of melodies in the major or minor musical mode. They were required to match musical fragments with schematic representations of happy and sad faces. Results. The groups did not differ in their ability to ascribe the musical examples to the two affective categories. Conclusions. In contrast to their performance within social and interpersonal domains, children with autistic disorders showed no deficits in processing affect in musical stimuli.
Perception of Emotion In Musical Performance In Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorders
Autism …
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are impaired in understanding the emotional undertones of speech, many of which are communicated through prosody. Musical performance also employs a form of prosody to communicate emotion, and the goal of this study was to examine the ability of adolescents with ASD to understand musical emotion. We designed an experiment in which each musical stimulus served as its own control while we varied the emotional expressivity by manipulating timing and amplitude variation. We asked children and adolescents with ASD and matched controls as well as individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) to rate how emotional these excerpts sounded. Results show that children and adolescents with ASD are impaired relative to matched controls and individuals with WS at judging the difference in emotionality among the expressivity levels. Implications for theories of emotion in autism are discussed in light of these findings.