Social-perceptual abilities in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome

Abstract

People with Williams syndrome (WMS) have a unique social phenotype characterised by unusually strong interest in other people and an engaging and empathic personality. Two experiments were designed to test whether this phenotype is associated with relatively spared abilities to decode mental-state information from nonverbal cues. The first experiment involved a modified version of the revised Eyes Test. The second experiment probed the ability to label emotions from brief dynamic facial displays. Adolescents and adults with WMS were compared to age-, IQ-, and language-matched participants with learning/intellectual disabilities, and age-matched normal controls. In both experiments the WMS group performed at a significantly lower level than the normal controls, and no different from the well-matched comparison-group with intellectual disabilities. These findings, contradicting earlier reports in the literature, argue against the view that in WMS social-perceptual abilities are relatively spared and can explain the social profile associated with this neurodevelopmental disorder.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (RO1 HD 33470), the National Institute on Neurological Diseases and Stroke (RO1 NS 44824), and by grant M01-RR00533 from the General Clinical Research Center program of the National Center for Research Resources, National Institutes of Health. We express our sincere thanks to the National Williams Syndrome Association and New England regional chapter for their help in recruiting participants; and to the families and individuals who participated in this study. We gratefully acknowledge the reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions for supplementary analyses.

Notes

We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting these supplementary analyses.