Williams syndrome hypersociability: a neuropsychological study of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex hypotheses.

The team tested 24 people with Williams syndrome and 24 typical peers.

Everyone completed face-reading and stop-signal tasks while the researchers tracked accuracy and speed.

They wanted to see if the well-known "over-friendly" profile links to weak fear processing or poor self-control.

The WS group was slower to name sad, fearful, and disgusted faces, but they spotted angry faces as fast as controls.

On the stop task they pressed the wrong button only a large share of the time, matching typical scores.

IQ scores, not diagnosis, best predicted how well each person did on every task.

Liu et al. (2023) also used face tasks and found kids with ASD show weak happy, sad, and fearful mimicry.

Both studies say facial emotion work is tricky for neurodevelopmental groups, but WS keeps threat detection while ASD does not.

Kasari et al. (2011) showed high-functioning ASD students sit on the edge of classroom networks; together the papers hint that intact anger reading in WS may help their social approach, whereas ASD misses multiple emotion cues and loses peer entry.

Van Keer et al. (2017) found cognitive level shapes how delayed toddlers respond to parents; Liliana et al. echo this by showing IQ, not syndrome label, drives task success, pushing us to target skill level instead of diagnosis alone.

When you assess a client with WS, do not assume global social blindness.

Expect trouble reading sad or scared faces, but trust their angry-face radar and self-control.

Write goals that build on their strength (threat detection) and teach them to pause and ask, "Is this person sad or scared?"

Because cognitive level predicts performance, teach emotion concepts at the learner’s mental age, not chronological age, and check understanding with simple match-to-sample before moving to natural contexts.