Recognition of facial expressions and prosodic cues with graded emotional intensities in late childhood, adolescence and adult

本研究调查了儿童、青春期和成人的情绪发展，以识别情绪强度不同的面部表情和情绪韵律的情绪类别。此外，我们调查了自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)患者的发展情况，发现ASD患者对面部和声音信息中愤怒和悲伤表情的识别能力较差。结果表明：1)在情绪再认任务中，青春期女性比男性对快乐和悲伤韵律更敏感，而对愤怒韵律不敏感，而青春期后期的情绪韵律在任何情绪类别上都不存在性别差异。2)自闭症患者在识别反转悲伤表情方面的表现优于对照组，这表明对代表悲伤情绪的局部面部信息的处理能力得到了增强。3)在脑成像研究中，我们发现正常发育组右侧PFC的激活程度显著高于ASD组。这些结果表明，情绪的发展与性别和发育阶段是复杂交织在一起的。

This study investigated the development of late childhood, adolescence and adults to recognize emotional categories of facialexpressions and emotional prosodies with graded emotional intensities. Moreover, we examined investigated the development of the individuals with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which showed poorer recognition performance for angry and sad expressions from both facial and vocal information. As a result, 1) in emotion recognition task, adolescent females were more sensitive to happy and sad prosody than males but not to angry prosody, whereas there were no sex-related differences in emotional prosody in late childhood for any of the emotional categories. 2) The individuals with ASD outperformed the control participants in recognizing inverted sad expressions, indicating enhanced processing of local facial information representing sad emotion. 3) In a brain imaging study, we found that the right PFC in normal development was significantly higher activation than that in ASD group. These results suggest that the emotional development is complexly intertwined with sex and developmental stage.