Psychology Research and Behavior Management (Nov 2023)
Own-Age Effects in a Face-Emotion Recognition Intervention for Children With ASD--Evidence From Eye Movements
Abstract
Linfei Su,1,2 Zehui Lin,1 Youyuan Li,1 Xiaoyan Wang,3 Zengping Lin,3 Lanjuan Dong,3 Ling Wei1 1Department of Psychology, School of Health, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou, People’s Republic of China; 2Institute of Psychology, School of Education Science, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China; 3Fuzhou Xingyu School, Fuzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Ling Wei, Tel +86-15960096260, Email [email protected]: The own-age effect is the phenomenon in which individuals perceive and recognize faces of their own age better than others in terms of cognitive processing. Previous eye movement studies on children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have reported that children with ASD have an attentional bias toward own-age faces and own-age scenes.Methods: The present study used own-age faces as the intervention material and examined the application of the own-age effect in the emotional recognition of faces in ASD. The length of the intervention was 12 weeks, and 2 sessions were conducted each week.Results: The results revealed that the own-age face intervention group gazed at children’s faces significantly more often than before the intervention, gazed at children’s angry faces significantly longer than before the intervention, and gazed at adults’ happy faces significantly longer and more often than before the intervention; the other-age faces intervention group did not differ significantly from the preintervention in gazing at children’s and adults’ faces after the intervention.Conclusion: The results suggest that own-age faces as teaching materials can better promote the emotion recognition ability of children with ASD than other-age faces.Plain language summary: ASD have difficulties with facial emotion recognition and previous study found that children with ASD correctly identified emotions in own-age faces more often than in other-age faces. Therefore, using pictures of children’s faces to intervene in children with ASD is beneficial to improve their facial emotion recognition ability. Previous studies have mostly used questionnaires to assess the effects of peer-matched interventions, and few have used an eye-movement technique that can effectively monitor changes in eye gaze patterns across different emotions.We found that the own-age face intervention group gazed at children’s faces significantly more often than before the intervention, gazed at children’s angry faces significantly longer than before the intervention, and gazed at adults’ happy faces significantly longer and more often than before the intervention. It indicates that own-age faces as teaching materials can better promote the emotion recognition ability of children with ASD than other-age faces.The own-age effect can be applied to experimental materials, the attribute settings of intervention materials, and the selection of accompanying objects to further expand the own-age effect in the educational intervention and training of social and cognitive abilities in ASD. It is expected to help autism improve its social skills and better integrate into the society.Keywords: children with autism spectrum disorders, own-age faces, intervention, eye tracking
