Mecanismos cognitivos de reconocimiento de información emocional facial en personas con síndrome de Down

Down's Syndrome (DS) individuals and control subjects were tested in two affective priming studies. The first one required subjects to recognize emotional faces with a short Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) (300 ms). The second one included an indirect measure of affective priming associated with an attention task with a long SOA (2,000 ms). The goal was to look for deficits on automatic and non automatic evaluation mechanisms of emotional information on DS individuals. The principal result was the observation that DS participants do not recognize negative information at short SOA (automatic evaluations) and that these individuals report significant slower latencies than control subjects to facial recognition through all experimental conditions. Implications of these results to appraisal theories of emotion as well as behavioural therapy are discussed.