Background: Children with Down syndrome (DS) often experience behavioral and emotional issues that complicate their socialization process and may lead to psychopathological disorders. These problems may be related to deficits affecting emotional knowledge, particularly emotional vocabulary. Because emotional vocabulary makes it easier for typically developing children to identify emotions, a deficit affecting it in DS could be problematic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Aims: Response to joint attention (RJA) and initiation of joint attention (IJA) are impaired in pre-schoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children's response to joint attention may depend on the presence of the target in the child's field of vision or on the type of deictic index (head and eye orientation, pointing and verbalisations) used by the adult to initiate joint attention.
Methods: This study deals with 50 ASD children aged from 2 years 8 months to 11 years 7 months, with a communicative level comparable to children under 31 months of age, according to the French version of the Early Social Communication Scales (ECSP, by its French acronym).
The hypersocial profile characterizing individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), and particularly their attraction to human faces and their desire to form relationships with other people, could favor the development of their emotion recognition capacities. This study seeks to better understand the development of emotion recognition capacities in WS. The ability to recognize six emotions was assessed in 15 participants with WS.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral studies have reported that persons with Down syndrome (DS) have difficulties recognizing emotions; however, there is insufficient research to prove that a deficit of emotional knowledge exists in DS. The aim of this study was to evaluate the recognition of emotional facial expressions without making use of emotional vocabulary, given the language problems known to be associated with this syndrome. The ability to recognize six emotions was assessed in 24 adolescents with DS.
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