Affect comprehension in children with pervasive developmental disorders.
Kids with PDD struggle with still-face emotion tasks, and the gap grows with real-world social problems.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers compared kids with PDD to kids matched on mental age. They tested how well each group could read emotions and match faces. The tasks used still photos, not moving pictures.
What they found
The PDD group scored lower on both emotion and face tasks. The worse they did, the more social trouble they had in real life. The gap was not just due to lower mental age.
How this fits with other research
Uono et al. (2010) later showed the same kids do fine when faces move. Static photos hurt; dynamic clips help. Pan et al. (2025) tracked eyes and heart rate in preschoolers and found flat arousal during social scenes, backing up the link between poor emotion reading and social problems.
Bradshaw et al. (2011) used eye-tracking to prove the face deficit is real, not a general vision issue. García-Blanco et al. (2017) added that kids who avoid angry faces longest also have the weakest social communication, pointing to a specific attention pattern that fuels the 1989 result.
Why it matters
When you run social-skills lessons, swap still flashcards for short video clips or live role-play. Watch for kids who look away from angry or surprised faces; prompt quick check-ins back to the eyes. Track both emotion naming and real-play interactions—scores on one predict trouble in the other.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Replace static emotion cards with 3-second video clips and record how often the child looks back to the eyes.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Affect comprehension was studied in children with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) and normal children matched for mental age. Three matching tasks were used: matching objects (a nonsocial control task), matching faces, and matching affects. The three tasks were developed to be of equal difficulty for normal children. Children were also tested for comprehension and expression of affect terms. The PDD children were impaired on affect matching relative to the normal controls. The PDD children were impaired on face and affect matching relative to their own performance on object matching, whereas the normal children were not. Within the PDD sample, object matching was correlated with mental age measures but not with measures of social behavior and play, but face and affect matching were significantly correlated with mental age as well as social behavior and play. Individual PDD children who showed relative deficits on face or affect matching tended to be more socially impaired than PDD children whose face and affect matching was consonant with their mental age. Results are discussed in terms of possible etiologies of the social deficit in PDD children, and the importance of subtypes within this population.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1989 · doi:10.1007/BF02211848