Emotional Competence in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Specific Language Impairment: A Comparative Research Review

Emotional competence (EC) refers to a set of skills to identify, understand, and respond to one's own emotions and those of others. It plays a fundamental role in socialization processes, where children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) show marked deficits. However, due to the similarities between these two conditions, it is difficult to establish a differential diagnosis at early ages. A literature search of the WOS, SCOPUS, and Proquest databases was conducted. Year of publication (from 2000 to 2019), type of paper (reviews, meta-analyses, and experimental studies), language (English), and age of participants (children up to 13 years) were applied as inclusion criteria. Based upon these criteria, 34 papers were included in this review. Results revealed that children with ASD showed impairments in facial emotion recognition, whereas those with SLI showed difficulties in emotion recognition in auditory and audiovisual modalities. Results also highlighted that both children with ASD and SLI showed biases towards the recognition of positive emotions.