Brief report: impaired identification of discrepancies between expressive faces and voices in adults with Asperger's syndrome.
Adults with Asperger's read single emotions fine but miss face-voice mismatches, so probe cross-modal integration directly.
01Research in Context
What this study did
O'Connor (2007) asked adults with Asperger's to spot when a face and voice did not match. The task used short clips where the emotion in the face and the emotion in the voice could agree or clash. A control group of typical adults did the same task.
Everyone also named single faces and single voices so the team could check basic emotion recognition.
What they found
Both groups named single emotions equally well. Yet when face and voice disagreed, the Asperger group missed far more mismatches than controls. They could see a happy face or hear a happy voice alone, but they did not notice when the two cues conflicted.
How this fits with other research
Doi et al. (2013) extends this result. They showed the same adult group also misses low-intensity angry or sad faces and high-intensity vocal emotions. Together the papers say cross-modal emotion gaps are wide and intensity matters.
Lecavalier et al. (2006) looks like a contradiction at first. Their children with Asperger's struggled with faces and voices even when each cue was shown alone. The difference is age: kids show broad emotion recognition delays, while adults master single cues but still fail when cues clash.
Saalasti et al. (2012) used a speech task instead of emotion. Asperger adults again showed weak audio-visual integration, supporting the idea that merging different channels is a core difficulty across domains.
Why it matters
If you test social skills only with single photos or single voice clips, you may overestimate an adult client's ability. Add brief face-voice mismatch trials to your assessment. Present a smiling face with a sad tone and ask, Do these match? A few such trials can flag subtle integration problems and guide clearer social-curriculum targets.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The aim of the present experiment was to examine the ability of adults with Asperger's syndrome and age-matched typically-developing controls to identify incongruent and congruent emotional information from the face and voice. In the first part of the experiment, participants determined whether simultaneously presented expressive faces and voices were the same or different. In the second part, participants identified expressive faces and voices in isolation. Results showed that relative to controls, adults with AS were less accurate at distinguishing between congruent and incongruent expressive faces and voices. Both groups obtained similar accuracy to expressive faces and voices presented in isolation. These findings may partially explain some of the difficulties individuals on the autistic spectrum have with social interaction.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2007 · doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0345-1