Hearing the feeling: Auditory emotion perception in Williams syndrome.
People with Williams syndrome match verbal-age peers in total auditory emotion scores, but the emotions they get right follow a different pattern and lean heavily on cognitive skill.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Heaton et al. (2020) asked people with Williams syndrome to name emotions they heard in voices and music.
They compared the scores to typically developing peers who had the same verbal mental age.
The team also looked at whether general thinking skills predicted success more in Williams syndrome than in the control group.
What they found
Total scores were about the same for both groups.
Yet the kinds of emotions they got right were not the same.
Cognitive ability helped the Williams group more than it helped the controls.
How this fits with other research
Santos et al. (2009) saw a similar pattern in Theory of Mind: Williams participants did fine on verbal tasks but slipped on visual ones.
Fullana et al. (2007) tested auditory emotion in autism. Kids with Asperger’s kept up, while kids with high-functioning autism missed low-intensity cues. The new study shows Williams syndrome flips the script—overall accuracy fits verbal age, but the profile of hits and misses is unique.
Ferreri et al. (2011) found fear and anger were hardest for Prader-Willi syndrome in faces. Pamela et al. now give us the auditory map for Williams syndrome, letting us compare ears instead of eyes.
Why it matters
When you test a client with Williams syndrome, do not rely on total score alone. Note which emotions they catch and which they miss. If the task is hard, check cognitive load first. Use this fine-grained profile to pick targets for social-skills training and to explain to families why the same child who chats happily may still misread tone.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Studies investigating recognition of facial expressions of emotions in Williams syndrome (WS) have reported difficulties in recognising negative expressions of emotion and a reliance on atypically developing underlying processes during task performance. AIM: The aim of the study was to extend these findings to the recognition of emotions in auditory domains. METHOD AND PROCEDURES: Children and adolescents with WS, together with chronological (CA) and verbal mental age matched (VMA) typically developing (TD) comparison groups, were asked to judge expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear in vocal and musical conditions. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Total emotion recognition scores did not differ between WS and VMA matched groups but profiles of discrimination across emotion categories were markedly different. For all groups, the accessibility of emotion category cues differed across music and speech domains. The results suggested that emotion discrimination is more strongly linked with cognitive ability in WS than in TD. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Although WS and TD groups showed a significantly different profile of discrimination across emotion categories, similarities in the pattern of discrimination across domains and in the correlates of auditory emotion processing were observed. The results are discussed in the context of typical and atypical developmental trajectories and compensatory mechanisms in WS.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2020 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2020.103660