Research on recognizing facial emotion expressions could change our understanding of autism

It's a prevalent misconception that people with autism have low emotional awareness and little understanding of how successful their own emotional recognition is.

However, new Australian research shows that adults with autism are just marginally less accurate than their non-autistic friends at recognizing facial expressions of emotion.

Recent studies contradict commonly held beliefs that individuals with autism have trouble recognizing social cues and have little understanding of how others read facial expressions, as shown in two publications recently published in the premier international journal Autism Research.

In a Flinders University study, 63 persons with autism and 67 non-autistic adults (IQs ranging from 85 to 143) took part in three to five-hour sessions to compare their abilities to recognize 12 different facial expressions of emotion, such as rage and grief.

Throughout the course of her PhD, Dr. Marie Georgopoulos gathered a variety of data, which the research team later reanalyzed and used as the foundation for a number of research publications.

The findings cast doubt on the notion that autistic individuals are unable to accurately interpret facial emotion signs and suggest that social problems associated with autism may instead represent changes that only become obvious in specific social interactions or high-stress situations.

This study reveals that autistic persons are, on average, only somewhat less accurate but also significantly slower when identifying others' emotions, according to study co-author and Matthew Flinders Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Psychology Neil Brewer.

These results refute the idea that individuals with autism are more prone to get overwhelmed by complex or dynamic emotional stimuli and have trouble identifying certain emotions.

Only a very tiny fraction of autistic people performed at levels below those of their non-autistic counterparts, and there was a significant overlap in the two groups' abilities.

No matter how emotions were given, the type of response needed, or the specific emotion being examined, the discrepancies across groups remained constant.

The study also found no indication of any differences between the samples of autistic and non-autistic people, despite the wide variation in how well each person understood and interpreted the emotions of others.

"The advanced approaches utilized in these investigations not only give more examples of previously unappreciated talents of autistic persons but also assist enhance our understanding of emotion processing in autism."

In order to make further progress, it is probable that we will need to tap behaviors related to emotion identification and responses to others' emotions in social situations, maybe even in virtual reality.

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Materials provided by Flinders University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.