4.2.6  Conclusions
The present study demonstrated differences in the spatiotemporal properties of neural activity during happy and angry face processing in adolescents with ASD. Our findings show discrepant neural recruitment patterns in adolescents with ASD, particularly in their failure to adequately integrate frontal, temporal, tempo-parietal and limbic brain regions into the facial affect processing network. These results suggest that impairments in face processing and possible deficits in appreciating social reward and punishment from positive and negative faces, respectively, may play a role in facial affect processing deficits in adolescents with ASD.
As the period of adolescence is accompanied by marked affective changes, a peak in the prevalence of negative emotional states, and heightened and more variable emotional responses, future longitudinal studies examining the neural networks recruited during emotional face processing in clinical child and adult populations can determine if these group differences increase or decrease from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood (Compas et al., 1995; Hare et al., 2008). Such findings will be critical to understanding when in development this skill acquisition is disturbed. Characterizing the developmental trajectory of emotional face processing in ASD will ultimately contribute to the understanding of the processes that underlie social impairment in ASD.