This item is intended to tap affect recognition of basic negative emotions with special regard for the recognition of the emotion fear. The recognition of basic negative emotions emerges early in typical development and even young infants are able to discriminate emotional expressions in the face (Field, Woodson, Greenberg, & Cohen, 1982; Walker-Andrews, 1997). Indeed, face and emotion processing in typical development is preferential, fast and automatic, and carried out in specialized brain regions (Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011). Like angry faces, fearful faces may signal social threat and prompt greater vigilance and thus “jump-start attentional focus” (Dennis, Malone, & Chen, 2009, p. 94) and quicker responding to fearful faces is associated with better emotion regulation in typically developing children (Dennis et al., 2009).
Recognition of Fear in ASD
Although some studies (usually those examining people with PDD or HFA) report no differences in the ability to recognize fear expressions (e.g., Bal, Harden, Lamb, Van Hecke, Denver, & Porges, 2010; Castelli, 2005) most studies show impairment in ASD relative to typically developing controls (Corden, Chilvers, & Skuse, 2008; Humphreys, Minshew, Leonard, & Behrmann, 2007; Pelphrey et al., 2002; Taylor, Maybery, Grayndler, & Whitehouse, 2015; Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013; Uono, Sato, & Toichi, 2011; Wallace, Coleman, & Bailey, 2008) with poorer fear recognition being closely associated with greater social dysfunction (Uono et al., 2011). One explanation for poor fear recognition among persons with ASD involves the observation that a common error pattern is misidentification of fear as anger (Wallace, Coleman, & Bailey, 2008) or disgust (Gagnon, Gosselin, Hudon-ven der Buhs, Larocque, & Milliard, 2010). This may reflect amygdala involvement (e.g., Ashwin, Chapman, Colle, & Baron-Cohen, 2006), the importance of the eye region of the face for discriminating fear from other negative emotions (e.g., there is a large amount of sclera visible in fearful eyes; Bal et al., 2010; Wallace et al., 2008), and a tendency to avoid the eye region especially during the processing of emotionally-arousing stimuli (Corden et al., 2008). In line with this interpretation, it has been found that poor fear recognition and reduced fixation to the eye region of the face are independently associated with greater levels of social anxiety in individuals with Asperger syndrome (Corden et al., 2008).
Recognition of Fear in ADHD
The vast majority of studies examining the recognition of fear in ADHD conclude that, compared to neurotypical groups, fear identification accuracy is impaired (Bora & Pantelis, 2016; Czaplewska & Lipowska, 2008; Demopoulos, Hopkins, & Davis, 2013; Ludlow, Garrood, Lawrence, & Gutierrez, 2014; Miller Hanford, Fassbender, Duke, & Schweitzer, 2011; Singh, Ellis, Winton, Singh, Leung, & Oswald, 1998; Sinzing, Morsch, & Lehmkuhl, 2008). Research has also shown that when emotion recognition is impaired, persons with ADHD tend to be unaware of their difficulties (Bisch et al., 2016) and because emotion recognition reaction time is longer in persons with ASD, this suggests that emotion recognition (including fear) is under controlled processing (i.e., effortful and intentional control; Markovska-Simoska & Pop-Jordanova, 2010).
Some interesting hit and miss patterns have emerged vis-à-vis the recognition of fear in ADHD. Although happy is a comparatively easy emotion to recognize (see item 25), when it is misidentified in ADHD, it tends to be mistaken for fear (Kats-Gold et al.,2007; Sinzing et al., 2008; see Castelli [2005] who report a similar finding for children with ASD). But children with ADHD also confuse surprise, sad, and angry with fear (Kats-Gold et al., 2007; Singh et al., 1998). The difficulty in the recognition of fear in ADHD has been attributed to a general learning process that is slower in ADHD due to a combination of inattention (Miller et al., 2011) and the relative infrequency of opportunities to observe fear as a naturally occurring emotion in the environment (Singh et al., 1998). Other researchers (e.g., Kats-Gold et al., 2007) have taken a different view, however, and attribute difficulty in fear recognition (and anger; see item 49) to a negative cognitive bias that skews decisions about emotion identification and is due to an inordinate degree of negativity in the daily living environment of children with ADHD.
Recognition of Fear in DoHH
When it comes to recognition of the basic emotions (i.e., happy, sad, mad, scared) in individuals who are DoHH, the evidence is mixed. Some studies have reported no differences between oral deaf and hearing children in emotion recognition accuracy (Hao & Su, 2014; Gray, Hosie, Russell, & Ormel, 2001; Hopyan-Misakyan, Gordon, Dennis, & Pasin, 2009; Hosie, Gray, Russell, Scott, & Hunter, 1998; Odom, Richard, Laukhuf, 1972; Weisel, 1985) whereas others have reported significant developmental delays (Bachara, Raphael, & Phelan, 1980; Dyck & Denver, 2003; Dyck, Farragia, Shochet, & Holmes-Brown, 2004) that, in turn, predict deficits in other areas of social cognition (e.g., empathy, Bachara et al., 1980). One likely explanation for the mixed results involves the nature of the stimuli and tasks. For example, studies that have reported no differences between DoHH and hearing controls tend to use static visual displays of exaggerated expressions whereas those that have detected results may be employing stimuli with less salient, but arguably more ecologically-valid, visual features (e.g., see Hao & Su, 2014 and Hopyan-Misakyan et al., 2009). Regardless of whether a deficit in fear recognition exists in DoHH, researchers tend to agree that in both DoHH and hearing children, fear recognition tends to be more difficult compared to happy and sad (Gray, Hosie, Russell, Scott, & Hunter, 2007). Also like typically developing children, the error data of children who are DoHH show that they tend to confuse fear with surprise and among very young children fear tends to be confused with sadness (Gray et al., 2007).
For more information about emotion recognition in ASD, ADHD, and DoHH, see the description of the Emotion Recognition Subscale.
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