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Face to face: Shown random face regions, ‘aloof’ parents of children with autism rely on mouths rather than on eyes to read emotions.
Parents of some children with autism rely on othersʼ mouths rather than eyes to read emotions, just as individuals with autism do, according to a study published today in Current Biology 1.
The study is the first to quantify specific face-processing traits in parents of children with autism, bolstering the longstanding belief that certain aspects of autism-related behavior are passed down from parents to children, an idea first suggested by Leo Kanner in 1943.
“This is a strong study and their methods are rigorous,” says Sara Jane Webb, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Using a technique called ‘bubbles,’ which shows participants small, randomly selected, regions of faces, the researchers asked parents to distinguish between two emotions, fear and happiness. The technique allows researchers to quantify whether individuals rely more on othersʼ eyes or mouths to evaluate emotion.
“The task theyʼre using is a very sophisticated way to look at the ability to sustain eye gaze,” says David Skuse, professor of psychiatry at University College Londonʼs Institute of Child Health. “It really is a gold standard task for picking up the subtle differences.”
The researchers divided the 62 study participants into three subgroups: parents of typically developing children; and among parents of children with autism, those who meet the “aloof” criterion of the Broad Autism Phenotype, and those who donʼt meet that criterion.
The aloof trait falls within a range of normal social behavior, but entails a tendency to not prefer interactions with others, not enjoy small talk, and have few close friendships.
The eyes have it:
Of the three groups, the researchers found, parents of typically developing children rely more on eyes than on the mouth to judge emotions. In contrast, aloof parents of children rely more on the mouth to judge emotions. And parents who arenʼt aloof fall somewhere in between.
“That’s fairly striking and certainly supports the hypothesis that there is a shared set of genes contributing to the social features of autism,” says researcher Ralph Adolphs, Bren professor of psychology and neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology.
Adolphs is using brain imaging to study the underlying brain structure and function in these parents. He says he expects to find that the brains of aloof parents of children with autism look more similar to those of individuals with autism than to controls.
The most exciting aspect of the study is the ability to discriminate between the aloof and non-aloof subgroups of parents with autistic children, adds Natalia Kleinhans, assistant professor of radiology at the University of Washington.
Kleinhans has shown that people with autism display atypical patterns of brain activity while viewing faces2. In 2005, Webb and others found that during face-processing tasks, brain activity in parents of some children with autism are similar to those seen in individuals with autism3.
“The expected follow-up work in this area is likely to provide critical information to help guide future genetic linkage studies,” Kleinhans says, “and help decipher the varied phenotypes of autism spectrum disorders.”
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