Impairments in social functioning are hallmarks of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and atypical functional connectivity may underlie these difficulties. Emotion processing networks typically undergo protracted maturational changes, however, those with ASD show either hyper- or hypo-connectivity with little consensus on the functional connectivity underpinning emotion processing. Magnetoencephalography was used to investigate age-related changes in whole-brain functional connectivity of eight regions of interest during happy and angry face processing in 190 children, adolescents and adults (6–39 years) with and without ASD. Findings revealed age-related changes from child- through to mid-adulthood in functional connectivity in controls and in ASD in theta, as well as age-related between-group differences across emotions, with connectivity decreasing in ASD, but increasing for controls, in gamma. Greater connectivity to angry faces was observed across groups in gamma. Emotion-specific age-related between-group differences in beta were also found, that showed opposite trends with age for happy and angry in ASD. Our results establish altered, frequency-specific developmental trajectories of functional connectivity in ASD, across distributed networks and a broad age range, which may finally help explain the heterogeneity in the literature.

社交功能受损是自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 的标志，非典型的功能连接可能是这些困难的基础。情绪处理网络通常会经历长期的成熟变化，然而，那些患有 ASD 的人表现出高度连接或低连接，对支持情绪处理的功能连接几乎没有共识。脑磁图用于调查 190 名患有和不患有 ASD 的儿童、青少年和成人（6-39 岁）在快乐和愤怒的面部处理过程中八个感兴趣区域的全脑功能连接的年龄相关变化。研究结果揭示了从儿童到成年中期的与年龄相关的控制功能连接和 theta 中的 ASD 的变化，以及与年龄相关的不同情绪的组间差异，随着 ASD 的连通性降低，但在 gamma 中对照增加。在 gamma 中的各组中观察到与愤怒面孔的连接性更强。还发现了与特定情绪年龄相关的β组间差异，这在 ASD 中表现出与年龄相反的快乐和愤怒趋势。我们的结果建立了 ASD 功能连接的改变的、特定于频率的发展轨迹，跨越分布式网络和广泛的年龄范围，这可能最终有助于解释文献中的异质性。