Educational Tool for Testing Emotion Recognition Abilities in Adolescents

Emotion recognition represents an important predictor for the development of social interactions. Previous studies have shown that the ability to recognize emotions, the speed, and accuracy, with which individuals process emotions, is an ability that develops with age, starting from early childhood. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show reduced attention to faces and they have difficulties in identifying emotions. Our goal was to investigate the effectiveness of a technology-based educational tool for assessing emotion recognition skills in individuals with ASD and typical developing children. 51 children aged between 12 and 14 years were enrolled in our study, out of which 11 have a diagnosis of ASD. Our results reveal that adolescents perceive emotions differently depending on the type of stimuli that we use and on their ages.