Developmental Science 7:3 (2004), pp 340 –359 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Blackwell Publishing Ltd PAPER Neural correlates of emotion Young children with autism show atypical brain responses to fearful versus neutral facial expressions of emotion Geraldine Dawson, 1,2 Sara J. Webb, 2 Leslie Carver, 3 Heracles Panagiotides 2 and James McPartland 1,2 1. Department of Psychology, University of Washington, USA 2. Center on Human Development and Disability, University of Washington, USA 3. Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, USA Abstract Evidence suggests that autism is associated with impaired emotion perception, but it is unknown how early such impairments are evident. Furthermore, most studies that have assessed emotion perception in children with autism have required verbal responses, making results difficult to interpret. This study utilized high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether 3–4-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show differential brain activity to fear versus neutral facial expressions. It has been shown that normal infants as young as 7 months of age show differential brain responses to faces express- ing different emotions. ERPs were recorded while children passively viewed photos of an unfamiliar woman posing a neutral and a prototypic fear expression. The sample consisted of 29 3–4-year-old children with ASD and 22 chronological age-matched children with typical development. Typically developing children exhibited a larger early negative component (N300) to the fear than to the neutral face. In contrast, children with ASD did not show the difference in amplitude of this early ERP component to the fear versus neutral face. For a later component, typically developing children exhibited a larger negative slow wave (NSW) to the fear than to the neutral face, whereas children with autism did not show a differential NSW to the two stimuli. In children with ASD, faster speed of early processing (i.e. N300 latency) of the fear face was associated with better performance on tasks assessing social attention (social orienting, joint attention and attention to distress). These data suggest that children with ASD, as young as 3 years of age, show a disordered pattern of neural responses to emotional stimuli. Introduction Autism is a disorder characterized by specific impair- ments in processing social and emotional information (e.g. Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg & Cohen, 1993; Dawson, Meltzoff, Osterling, Rinaldi & Brown, 1998b; Teunisse & DeGelder, 1994), with early-appearing impairments evident in social orienting (Dawson et al., 1998b; Dawson, Toth, Abbott, Osterling, Munson, Estes & Liaw, 2002b), joint attention (Mundy, Sigman, Ungerer & Sherman, 1986; Dawson, Meltzoff, Osterling & Rinaldi, 1998a), responses to the emotional displays of others (Sigman, Kasari, Kwon & Yirmiya, 1992) and face recognition (Dawson, Carver, Meltzoff, Panagiotides, McPartland & Webb, 2002a; Klin, Sparrow, de Bilt, Cicchetti, Cohen & Volkmar, 1999). These social impairments, some of which are apparent by 1 year of age (Osterling & Dawson, 1994; Osterling, Dawson & Munson, 2002), suggest that autism is related to early dysfunction of brain circuitry involved in social cognition (Baron-Cohen, Ring, Wheel- wright, Bullmore, Brammer, Simmons & Williams, 1999; Baron-Cohen, Ring, Bullmore, Wheelwright, Ashwin & Williams, 2000; Dawson, 1996). In this paper, we explore further the nature of early impairments in social cognition in autism. We were inter- ested in assessing very young children’s electrical brain responses to an emotional facial expression. Processing the emotional expressions displayed by another individual involves attention to and perception of the face of that individual, as well as perception of the specific emotion and context of the event. By 3 to 4 years of age, children with ASD are already showing impairments in face process- ing (Dawson et al., 2002a; Webb, Dawson & Shook, 2002). It is currently unknown whether emotion processing, Address for correspondence: Geraldine Dawson, Center on Human Development and Disability, Box 357920, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA; e-mail: dawson@u.washington.edu