Premium
Processing of stimulus content but not of emotional valence is altered in persons with Williams syndrome
Author(s) -
Key A. P.,
Dykens E. M.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of intellectual disability research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.941
H-Index - 104
eISSN - 1365-2788
pISSN - 0964-2633
DOI - 10.1111/jir.12319
Subject(s) - psychology , stimulus (psychology) , valence (chemistry) , perception , emotion perception , facial expression , face perception , arousal , cognitive psychology , emotional valence , salience (neuroscience) , emotional expression , developmental psychology , cognition , social psychology , communication , neuroscience , physics , quantum mechanics
Background Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) exhibit hypersociability and may respond atypically to emotional information in social and nonsocial stimuli. It is not yet clear whether these difficulties are specific to emotional content or stimulus type. This study examined the neural processes supporting social and emotional information processing in WS. Method Visual event‐related potentials were recorded in 19 adults with WS and 10 typical peers during a picture‐viewing task requiring detection of smiling faces among other social and nonsocial images with positive and negative emotional content. Results The participant groups were not significantly different in affective processing of positive and negative stimuli and perceived faces as different from nonsocial images. Participants with WS showed subtle differences in face‐specific perceptual processes (e.g. face inversion, N170 lateralisation), suggesting a more feature‐based processing. They also demonstrated reduced attention and arousal modulation (P3, late positive potential) in response to faces vs. nonsocial images. These differences were independent of intelligence quotient. Conclusions There was no evidence of greater than typical perceptual, attentional or affective processing of social information in WS. The results support the idea that altered face perception processes and not the increased salience of social stimuli or difficulties with emotion discrimination may contribute to the hypersocial phenotype in WS.