Atypical perception of affective prosody in Autism Spectrum Disorder (original) (raw)
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Emotional prosody processing in autism spectrum disorder
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are characterized by severe deficits in social communication, whereby the nature of their impairments in emotional prosody processing have yet to be specified. Here, we investigated emotional prosody processing in individuals with ASD and controls with novel, lifelike behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms. Compared to controls, individuals with ASD showed reduced emotional prosody recognition accuracy on a behavioral task. On the neural level, individuals with ASD displayed reduced activity of the STS, insula and amygdala for complex vs basic emotions compared to controls. Moreover, the coupling between the STS and amygdala for complex vs basic emotions was reduced in the ASD group. Finally, groups differed with respect to the relationship between brain activity and behavioral performance. Brain activity during emotional prosody processing was more strongly related to prosody recognition accuracy in ASD participants. In contrast, the coupling between STS and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity predicted behavioral task performance more strongly in the control group. These results provide evidence for aberrant emotional prosody processing of individuals with ASD. They suggest that the differences in the relationship between the neural and behavioral level of individuals with ASD may account for their observed deficits in social communication.
Neural bases of emotional language processing in individuals with and without autism
2015
A fundamental aspect of successful social interactions is the ability to accurately infer others' verbal communication, often including information related to the speaker's feelings. Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by language and social-affective impairments, and also aberrant functional neural responses to socially-relevant stimuli. The main objective of the current research was to examine the behavioral and neural effects of making affective inferences from language lacking overt prosody or explicit emotional words in individuals with and without autism. In neurotypical individuals, the current data are consistent with previous studies showing that verbal emotional stimuli enhances activation of brain regions generally responsive to discourse, and also "social-affective" brain regions, specifically medial/orbital frontal regions, bilateral middle temporal areas, temporal parietal junction/superior temporal gyri and pCC/PC. Moreover, these regions respond differentially to positive and negative valence, most clearly in the medial frontal area. Further, results suggest that mentalizing alone does not account for the differences between emotional and neutral stories, as all of our stories required similar inferencing of the feelings of the protagonist. In autism, there is general agreement that the neurodevelopmental disorder is marked by impairments in pragmatic language understandings, emotional processes, and the ability to "mentalize," others' thoughts, intentions and beliefs. However, findings are mixed regarding the precise nature of emotional language understandings. Results of the present study suggest that autistic individuals are able to make language-based emotional inferences, and that like neurotypical controls, social-affective brain regions show task-related facilitation effects for emotional compared to neutral valence. However, the neural activations in the autism group were generally greater than controls, especially in response to emotion. Additionally, results showed greater difficulty with incongruent judgments in participants with autism. Together, these findings represent a first step toward revealing social-affective abilities in the language context in autism, despite irregular brain response. Such understandings are critical to generating effective intervention strategies and therapeutic practices for autistic individuals and their families. For remediation to be most beneficial, one must understand and utilize areas of skill, and leverage those to positively impact deficits.
The Perception of Affective Prosody in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Typical Peers
Clinical Archives of Communication Disorders
This study investigated the ability of children with ASD, including the minimally verbal subgroup, to perceive angry, neutral, and happy prosody in low-pass filtered speech when provided with a structured training paradigm. Methods: 13 children with ASD and 21 TD children completed the experimental task and two additional measures (nonverbal cognitive abilities, social responsiveness deficits) for regression analyses. Results: The ASD group recognized prosodic conditions significantly less accurately than the TD group, and took significantly longer times to recognize all sentences compared to the TD group. Angry prosody was consistently the most difficult to recognize across groups. Nonverbal cognitive abilities is a significant predictor variable for successful recognition of neutral and happy prosody; although low nonverbal cognitive skills do not preclude minimally verbal children with ASD from accurately perceiving affective prosody. Conclusions: The present study shows it is possible for minimally verbal children with ASD to successfully participate in experimental research using judgment tasks when provided with appropriate training.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2014
Prosody is an important tool of human communication, carrying both affective and pragmatic messages in speech. Prosody recognition relies on processing of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency of the voice signal, and their interpretation according to acquired socioemotional scripts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficiencies in affective prosody recognition. These deficiencies have been mostly associated with general difficulties in emotion recognition. The current study explored an additional association between affective prosody recognition in ASD and auditory perceptual abilities. Twenty high-functioning male adults with ASD and 32 typically developing male adults, matched on age and verbal abilities undertook a battery of auditory tasks. These included affective and pragmatic prosody recognition tasks, two psychoacoustic tasks (pitch direction recognition and pitch discrimination), and a facial emotion recognition task, representing nonvocal e...
Processing of Affective Speech Prosody is Impaired in Asperger Syndrome
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2007
Many people with the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (AS) show poorly developed skills in understanding emotional messages. The present study addressed discrimination of speech prosody in children with AS at neurophysiological level. Detection of affective prosody was investigated in one-word utterances as indexed by the N1 and the mismatch negativity (MMN) of auditory event-related potentials (ERPs). Data from fourteen boys with AS were compared with those for thirteen typically developed boys.
Underconnectivity of the superior temporal sulcus predicts emotion recognition deficits in autism
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2013
Neurodevelopmental disconnections have been assumed to cause behavioral alterations in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Here, we combined measurements of intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with task-based fMRI to explore whether altered activity and/or iFC of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) mediates deficits in emotion recognition in ASD. Fifteen adults with ASD and 15 matched-controls underwent resting-state and task-based fMRI, during which participants discriminated emotional states from point light displays (PLDs). Intrinsic FC of the right pSTS was further examined using 584 (278 ASD/306 controls) resting-state data of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE). Participants with ASD were less accurate than controls in recognizing emotional states from PLDs. Analyses revealed pronounced ASD-related reductions both in task-based activity and resting-state iFC of the right pSTS with fronto-parietal areas typically encompassing the action observation network (AON). Notably, pSTS-hypo-activity was related to pSTS-hypo-connectivity, and both measures were predictive of emotion recognition performance with each measure explaining a unique part of the variance. Analyses with the large independent ABIDE dataset replicated reductions in pSTS-iFC to fronto-parietal regions. These findings provide novel evidence that pSTS hypo-activity and hypo-connectivity with the fronto-parietal AON are linked to the social deficits characteristic of ASD. We are grateful to all the subjects who voluntarily participated in this research and to E. Nackaerts for her help with data collection. We thank I. Noens, J. Wagemans and other members of the Leuven Autism Research Consortium (LAuRes) for discussion and aid in subject recruitment. We would also like to thank all the members of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange Consortium (ABIDE; http://fcon\_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/abide/) and Michael P. Milham and the INDI team (http://fcon\_1000.projects.nitrc.org/) supporting the ABIDE effort. We especially thank the sites whose data were included in these analyses and their funding sources: (i) Olin, Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital [Autism Speaks (to M.A.), Hartford Hospital (to M.A.)], (ii)
In verbal communication with others, children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) experience difficulties with understanding jokes, irony, and other pragmatic aspects of communication. Difficulties with the understanding and expression of prosody may be one reason. In this study an understanding of prosody test and an expression of prosody test were constructed and applied to a group of children with ASD (average 9.7 years of age) and three control groups of typical children (3, 4 and 5 years of age, respectively). Overall results showed that the ASD group had lower scores in both prosody tests compared to 5 year old controls but higher scores than the 3 year old controls.
Neuropsychologia, 2013
The abilities to recognize and integrate emotions from another person's facial and vocal expressions are fundamental cognitive skills involved in the effective regulation of social interactions. Deficits in such abilities have been suggested as a possible source for certain atypical social behaviors manifested by persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In the present study, we assessed the recognition and integration of emotional expressions in ASD using a validated set of ecological stimuli comprised of dynamic visual and auditory (non-verbal) vocal clips. Autistic participants and typically developing controls (TD) were asked to discriminate between clips depicting expressions of disgust and fear presented either visually, auditorily or audio-visually. The group of autistic participants was less efficient to discriminate emotional expressions across all conditions (unimodal and bimodal). Moreover, they necessitated a higher signal-to-noise ratio for the discrimination of visual or auditory presentations of disgust versus fear expressions. These results suggest an altered sensitivity to emotion expressions in this population that is not modality-specific. In addition, the group of autistic participants benefited from exposure to bimodal information to a lesser extent than did the TD group, indicative of a decreased multisensory gain in this population. These results are the first to compellingly demonstrate joint alterations for both the perception and the integration of multisensory emotion expressions in ASD.