Research Highlights

For the past two decades, we have been investigating social perception and social cognition in children, adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome. Our studies have revealed a striking pattern of both strengths and weaknesses in the ways children and adults with Williams syndrome attend to, perceive and process social and emotional information.

• Children with Williams syndrome have difficulty understanding mental states such as false belief in other people, as do other children with other developmental disorders.  Their difficulties are related to the cognitive and language aspects of the task and may explain some of their social difficulties. Adolescents also have difficulty understanding other people’s intentions with regard to moral reasoning, distinguishing between lies and jokes, or using information about a person’s character in predicting behavior.
• People with Williams syndrome are sensitive to other people’s emotions, but have difficulties in labeling emotional expressions in faces and voices, performing as other people with developmental disorders on emotion recognition tasks.  However, they are better at recognizing affective intonation in speech when they don’t have to pay attention to the words.
• Adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome show unusually low arousal when they look at social signals of potential threat such as fearful and angry faces, as indicated by their skin conductance responses and heart rate heart rate responses.
• Toddlers with Williams Syndrome form secure attachments to their parents and close family members even though they often approach unknown adults, and show less ‘stranger wariness’ compared to other children their age.
• Young children with Williams syndrome show more empathy toward a person in distress than typically developing children or children with other developmental disorders, but they don’t differ from other children in their spontaneous attempts to help an adult in need.