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

本研究考察了儿童晚期、青少年和成人识别面部表情和情绪韵律的情绪类别的发展。此外，我们还研究了自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者的发展，他们对面部和声音信息中的愤怒和悲伤表情的识别表现较差。结果表明：1)在情绪识别任务中，青春期女性对快乐韵律和悲伤韵律的敏感度高于男性，而对愤怒韵律的敏感度不高，而在童年后期的情绪韵律中，任何情绪类别的性别差异都不存在。2) ASD个体对悲伤表情的识别优于对照组，表明表征悲伤情绪的局部面部信息加工能力增强。3)在脑成像研究中，我们发现正常发育组右侧PFC的激活明显高于ASD组。这些结果表明，情感发展与性别和发育阶段复杂地交织在一起。

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.