Recognition of emotion in facial expression by people with Prader-Willi syndrome.
People with Prader-Willi syndrome recognize only 55% of basic facial emotions—target fear and anger in social skills training.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked people with Prader-Willi syndrome to name six basic emotions from photos.
They ran one session with each participant and counted correct labels.
The paper is a small case series, so it gives a snapshot, not a cause-and-effect test.
What they found
Overall hit rate was 55%.
Fear and anger were missed most often.
The pattern matches what we see in broader intellectual disability groups.
How this fits with other research
Ohan et al. (2015) pooled many studies and found large, steady emotion-reading deficits across adults with ID.
Koenig et al. (2004) showed that people with PWS also struggle to read unclear social scenes, scoring like a PDD group.
Repp et al. (1992) first proved that matched mental age is not enough; people with ID still score lower on face tasks.
Together the papers say the trouble is real, specific, and not just low IQ.
Why it matters
If your client has PWS, do not assume they can read faces. Add brief emotion-ID drills before social skills training. Start with happy faces, then give extra trials for fear and anger. Track correct labels and adjust prompting.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Show a fear face card, ask the client to name it, prompt if wrong, and keep tally for five trials.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: People with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) may have mild intellectual impairments but less is known about their social cognition. Most parents/carers report that people with PWS do not have normal peer relationships, although some have older or younger friends. Two specific aspects of social cognition are being able to recognise other people's emotion and to then respond appropriately. In a previous study, mothers/carers thought that 26% of children and 23% of adults with PWS would not respond to others' feelings. They also thought that 64% could recognise happiness, sadness, anger and fear and a further 30% could recognise happiness and sadness. However, reports of emotion recognition and response to emotion were partially dissociated. It was therefore decided to test facial emotion recognition directly. METHOD: The participants were 58 people of all ages with PWS. They were shown a total of 20 faces, each depicting one of the six basic emotions and asked to say what they thought that person was feeling. The faces were shown one at a time in random order and each was accompanied by a reminder of the six basic emotions. RESULTS: This cohort of people with PWS correctly identified 55% of the different facial emotions. These included 90% of happy faces, 55% each of sad and surprised faces, 43% of disgusted faces, 40% of angry faces and 37% of fearful faces. Genetic subtype differences were found only in the predictors of recognition scores, not in the scores themselves. Selective impairment was found in fear recognition for those with PWS who had had a depressive illness and in anger recognition for those with PWS who had had a psychotic illness. CONCLUSIONS: The inability to read facial expressions of emotion is a deficit in social cognition apparent in people with PWS. This may be a contributing factor in their difficulties with peer relationships.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2011 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2010.01348.x