Eye Avoidance of Threatening Facial Expressions in Parents of Children with ASD

Tingting Yang,1,* Dandan Li,1– 3,* Yifan Zhang,1 Long Zhang,2,3 Hong Li,4 Gong-Jun Ji,1– 3 Zhenhai Yang,5 Lei Zhang,1,3 Chunyan Zhu,1,3,* Kai Wang1– 3,6 1School of Mental Health and Psychological Sciences, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, 230022, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Neurology, the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, 230022, People’s Republic of China; 3Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Cognition and Neuropsychiatric Disorders, Hefei, 230022, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Neurological Rehabilitation of Children, Anhui Provincial Children’s Hospital, Hefei, 230022, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Rehabilitation therapy, The First Clinical Medical College of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, 230022, People’s Republic of China; 6Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei, 230022, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Lei Zhang; Chunyan ZhuSchool of Mental Health and Psychological Sciences, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail zhanglei17236@aliyun.com; ayswallow@126.comObjective: Previous research found that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was characterized by eye avoidance of threatening facial expressions. However, it still remains unclear as to whether these abnormalities are present in parents of children with ASD. Our study aimed to investigate the gaze patterns of parents of children with ASD in the threatening facial expressions.Methods: Thirty-four parents of children with ASD and 35 parents of typically developing (TD) children participated in our study. We investigated the total fixation time of participants when they viewed different facial expression (eg, happy, fearful, angry, sad) videos and examined changes in the fixation duration over time.Results: We observed the following: a) the total fixation time of the parents of children with ASD on the eyes of fearful faces was significantly shorter than that of the normal group, and the difference lasted for five seconds (four to six seconds, eight to nine seconds) throughout the process; and b) The parents of children with ASD avoided the eyes of angry expression faces at around five seconds after the stimulus onset.Conclusion: We concluded that parents of children with ASD tended to avoid the eyes of threatening expression faces while viewing the dynamic emotions video.Keywords: parents of children with ASD, total fixation time, threatening facial expressions