+Interpreting Faces and Eyes in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Fragile X Syndrome and Rubinstein Taybi SyndromeHayley Mace, Joanna Moss, Giles Anderson, Chris Oliver and Joseph McCleery

+Different Social Phenotypes

Fragile X Syndrome

• Rare genetic syndrome

• Intellectual disability

• Autism (Moss & Howlin, 2009)

• Social withdrawal

• Social anxiety• (Cornish et al., 2007)

Autism Spectrum Disorders

• Triad of impairments• Social

withdrawal• Social

indifference• (Cornish et al., 2007)

Rubinstein Taybi Syndrome

• Rare genetic syndrome

• Intellectual disability • Increased

social competence given degree of intellectual disability

• (Galera et al., 2009)

+Social Phenotypes and Face Processing

Williams syndrome: Increased looking at the eyes compared to TD (Riby & Hancock, 2008)

FXS: Decreased eye looking compared to TD (Farzin et al., 2009)

ASD: Typical eye looking when using static stimuli (Speer et al., 2007)

RTS: No previous literature

+Eye Looking and Emotion Recognition

Eye gaze important for accurate emotion recognition (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997b)

Impairments in understanding emotions suggested to underlie social impairments in psychiatric disorders (Baron-Cohen, 1995, 2002; Happé & Frith, 1996; Brüne, 2004)

Intact explicit emotion recognition in FXS (Turk & Cornish.,

1998) and ASD (see Harms, Martin & Wallace, 2010)

Importance of distinguishing implicit/explicit (Senju, Southgate, White & Frith., 2009)

+Research Questions

1) Do individuals with FXS, ASD and RTS show differential looking patterns to facial features?

Hypothesis: Increased eye looking in RTS, decreased eye looking in FXS and typical eye looking in ASD

Do individuals with FXS, ASD and RTS spontaneously discriminate between emotions?

Hypothesis: Atypical in FXS, typical in RTS

+Method: Participants

Characteristic FXS (n=13)

ASD (n=15)

RTS(n = 17)

TD Child (n=14)

Age in Years

Mean (SD) 19.70 (9.00) 11.01 (3.48) 17.33 (10.14) 6.99 (1.67)

Range 6.60 - 34.19 6.71 - 18.76 4.31 - 37.10 3.80 - 9.50

Gender (% male) 92.31 80.00 41.18 50.00

Adaptive Behaviour Age Equivalence Mean in Years (SD)

5.88 (2.15) 4.92 (3.38) 6.04 (3.49) N/A

ASD & FXS: Database of participants who have previously taken part in studies at the Cerebra Centre

+Method

Emotion -Happy

One face displayed a neutral expression, the other displayed a happy expression

5 trials

Baseline trials

Both faces displayed a neutral expression

70 trials

Emotion - Disgust One face

displayed a neutral expression, the other displayed a disgust expression

5 trials

2 faces for 1.5 seconds

1 of 2 blocks (different presentation order)

Passive viewing

+Heat Maps

ASD FXS

Td ChildRTS

+Looking at the Eyes & Mouth

Significant between-groups difference in time spent looking at the eye region (F (3,55) = 7.345, p < .001)

Bonferroni post-hoc tests:

FXS look less at eyes than ASD (p < .001) and TD Child (p = .004)

No significant difference between groups in mouth looking (F (3,55) = 1.284, p = .289)

ASD FXS TD Child RTS0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

% o

f tr

ial

loo

kin

g a

t e

ye

s o

f n

eu

tra

l fa

ce

s

* *

ASD FXS TD Child RTS0%

1%

2%

3%

4%

5%

6%

7%

8%

9%

%o

f tr

ial

loo

kin

g a

t m

ou

th o

f n

eu

tra

l fa

ce

s

+Results: Spontaneous Emotion Discrimination

All groups looked at happy and neutral faces a similar amount (p > .05)

All groups looked significantly longer at disgust faces than neutral faces (p < .05)

No between group differences in happy preference (F (3,55) =1.595, p = .201) or disgust preference (F (3,55) = .624, p = .602)

FXS ASD TD child RTS

-10%

-5%

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

happy preference disgust preference

%o

f e

xtr

a t

ime

lo

ok

ing

a

t e

mo

tio

na

l fa

ce

s

co

mp

are

d t

o n

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*

* **

+Results

FXS look less at the eyes than ASD and TD

ASD look at the eyes a similar amount to TD children

RTS look at the eyes a similar amount to TD children

All participants performed the same on spontaneous emotion discrimination

Accounting for differences between participant characteristics: CA & ANCOVA

+Eye Looking and Social Phenotypes

FXSSocial

anxiety

Less eye looking

ASDSocial

indifference

Typical eye looking

RTSSocial

competence

Typical eye looking

+Discussion: Looking to the Eyes and Mouth

FXS consistent with literature (Farzin et al., 2008)

ASD consistent with static literature Static stimuli (Speer et al., 2007)

Less eye looking in ASD with moving stimuli (Klin et al., 2002)

No previous literature for RTS Similar social phenotype as WS but

differences in looking to the eyes (Klin et al., 2002)

+Discussion: Spontaneous Emotion Discrimination

All participants discriminated between disgust and neutral faces but not happy and neutral faces

Negativity bias Look longer at fearful than happy (Ludemann & Nelson, 1988)

Novelty bias Attentional advantage (Desimone & Duncan, 1995)

Participants with ASD, FXS and RTS discriminate emotions in the same way as TD participants

+Discussion

Similar behaviours in ASD and FXS but differences in eye looking

Similar behaviours in RTS and WS but differences in eye looking

FXS reduced eye looking but typical spontaneous emotion discrimination Compensatory mechanisms?

ASD FXS TD Child RTS0%

1%

2%

3%

4%

5%

6%

7%

8%

9%

+Thank you for listening

Thank you to:

Families

Fragile X Society, UK and RTS, UK

Funders: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Cerebra

Supervisors: Dr. Joe McCleery, Dr. Joanna Moss, Professor Chris Oliver