Research explains why children with autism have difficulty indentifying emotions

New research presented at the Society for Neuroscience this past Wednesday has provided a clear explanation of why children with bipolar disorder have difficulty identifying and identifying the correct emotions in facial expressions. In brief, children with autism, severe mood dysregulation or bipolar disorders have a hard time identifying facial expressions because the affected children spend less time looking at a someone's eye.

It has been known for many decades that children with bipolar disorders or severe mood dysregulation have deficits in labeling facial expressions. For instance, an affected child may recognize your face and facial expressions only with a particular set of clothing accessories such as a particular hat, scarf or other head gear. On the hand, that same affected child may not recognize you if you wear a different hat or scarf the following day.

This phenomenon has intrigued and puzzled psychiatrists for many years. However, the research presented at the Society for Neuroscience on Wednesday November 16 at Washington D.C., by Pilyoung Kim from the National Institute of Mental Health, claimed that children with bipolar disorder tended to spend more time looking at the nose and mouth regions of faces as opposed to the eyes compared to a healthy control group. Interestingly, severe mood dysregulation disorder children had the least accuracy in tagging the correct emotions to a set of photographs compared to normal children and bipolar children while bipolar children fared the worse.

The methodology behind these studies involved the use of a sophisticated eye tracker that was mounted as a headset onto the heads of children. Eye movements were measured with an EyeLink II head-mounted eye tracker. Participants saw photographs of people showing four emotions (anger, sadness, happiness, and neutral) and were asked to label the emotion for each face.

"In combination with other studies , our findings indicate the potential value of treatment programs that teach children how to identify emotions by looking at others 'eyes', said Kim " If such training helps children to process the emotional information in the world more accurately, that may in turn increase their ability to regulate their emotional reactions to social situations".