Exploring Multimodal Social-Emotional Behaviors in Autism Spectrum Disorders: An Interface between Social Signal Processing and Psychopathology

The purpose of this paper is to present our original and multidisciplinary approach to study multimodal social-emotional behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorders. Our goal is to conduct fundamental and applied research regarding the reception and production of social signals involved in human interactions. To achieve this aim, we try to understand and model cognitive and multimodal emotional integration (e.g., auditory, visual, postural) during infancy and to analyze dysfunctions in pathologies that affect the dynamics of social interactions such as autism spectrum disorders. More specifically, we study the characterization of multimodal social-emotional signals (speech, prosody, faces, postures) and the dynamics of communication (e.g., synchrony, engagement). The fields of application covered are the improvement of differential diagnosis, interactive robotics, assisting people with autism spectrum disorders and their caregivers, and objectification in psychopathology.