Affective Computing in Youth Psychopathology: Protocol for the Adolescent Communication of Emotions Study

Abstract

The identification of objective, scalable markers of socio-emotional behavior represents a major challenge in pediatric mental health diagnostics. Few approaches exist to reliably and objectively quantify social reciprocity and negative emotional states, which characterize many psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions, including anxiety, depression, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and autism. Advances in computer vision, natural language analytics, and psychophysiology enable fine-grained, objective measurement of socio-emotional behavior along these transdiagnostic dimensions, yet their application to youth remains limited. This article presents multimodal affective computing as an innovative approach with the potential to quantify objective markers of psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions in adolescents. The Affective Computing in Youth Psychopathology (ACES) study is a multi-site investigation designed to develop and validate novel behavioral and physiological markers of socio-emotional functioning across autistic and non-autistic youth with or without anxiety or depression. The study combines a standardized experimental battery to elicit spontaneous emotional and social behavior with a clinical battery to capture diagnostic status and clinical characteristics. By integrating clinical assessments and experimental paradigms with advanced multimodal phenotyping, ACES seeks to identify transdiagnostic markers of social and emotional behavior during adolescence, a critical window for the emergence of many psychiatric conditions. We describe the rationale, design, and analytic framework of ACES, highlighting how innovative affective computing technologies can provide objective and scalable assessment tools that ultimately advance precision psychiatry.