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.