Accuracy of the Event Related Potentials in Evaluation of Facial Emotion Recognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Review study

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by social and communication problems such as difficulties in emotion recognition. There are many studies regarding emotion recognition ability in ASD, the results of them almost are different, not easily extendable and ambiguous due to small sample size and IQ range of the population study. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) known as the useful way to examine emotion recognition. Comparing fMRI and ERPs, the Event Related Potentials provide higher and better temporal resolution. The present review article studied the efficacy of ERPs for facial emotion recognition in ASD. All the papers that have published with the related subject to ERPs and ASD since 2000 on the main database including the PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus used for this review. The results showed that facial processing ERPs components have a delay in identifying feelings. Studies showed that, in contrast to normal developed children, N300 is not faster in children with ASD in the presence of fearful versus neutral faces. Some other studies show normal levels of ERP in children with high-functioning autism, but in the analysis of the dipole source, weaker and slower responses in frontal, fusiform, and visual cortex, along with slower and larger responses in parietal somatosensory cortex also observed. Recent studies show delayed components of ERPs in response to emotional face stimuli and there might be unusual activity in sensory processing circuits in ASD.

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Department of Medical Basic Sciences , Faculty of Allied Medicine , Iran University of Medical Sciences , Tehran , Iran