Healthy emotional adjustment across childhood is dependent on the ability to understand emotional states in other people. Conversely, deficits in emotion processing are linked with increased risk for specific forms of childhood mental health problems. For example, autism is associated with impaired face discrimination and emotion recognition. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have problems processing faces and show reduced attention to the eyes.
Our team at UNSW has recently shown that children a severe form of conduct disorder also have difficulties recognizing specific emotions in other people. These children have a ‘blindness’ to fear in other people. Like children with autism, it is largely due to their inability to pay attention to the important things that make us human. Using eye tracking equipment, we were able to show that these children show an absence of focusing on the eye region of other people’s faces (see figure 2). In a follow-up study we confirmed that gaze deficits can also be observed in naturalistic interactions between the child and his caregivers. That is, conduct problem children with high CU were shown to show substantial deficits in their eye contact with their parents. These findings indicate that emotion recognition deficits are related to attentional processes that are amenable to intervention.
To make sense of these new and important discoveries, we need to be able to track children’s attention and eye gaze while scanning brain activity. The current eye trackers we use cannot be used inside scanners, however, a number of international research companies have developed eye tracking equipment specifically for this purpose. Establishment of such facilities will provide an innovative research facility that enables us to see the world through the eyes of children showing serious problems with emotion recognition, a first step in developing methods to correct these problems.
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