People with autism can’t recognize emotions. – Could this be false?

Consider the various ways in which you observe other people’s emotions in your daily life. Do you pay attention to their expressions? their nonverbal cues? or the way they speak? While some of us may go about our regular lives without giving these things a second thought, people with autism frequently find it challenging to express their emotions and pick up on others’ emotions.

Recognizing emotional facial expressions is crucial for developing connections and social engagement in childhood. Recognizing the emotions and expressions of others is one of the basic abilities allowing us to comprehend others’ intents and mental status and has a significant function in enabling us to interact with people around us.

There is a pervasive perception that people with autism lack empathy and are unable to grasp emotion. Indeed, many persons with autism do not express emotion in ways that those who do not have the disorder would recognize.

However, a new Australian study suggests that we may need to rethink widely held assumptions that adults with autism have difficulty recognizing social emotions and have a limited understanding of how they process other people’s facial expressions.

In a Flinders University study, where participants, 67 IQ-matched autistic and 67 non-autistic adults, were presented with multiple examples of 12 different face emotion types found that individuals with autism are just slightly less accurate than their non-autistic peers at recognizing facial expressions of emotion.

They also found out that how the stimuli were presented and the format for providing responses all affected accuracy and speed of emotion recognition. But those variations didn’t affect the differences between autistic and non-autistic groups’ responses.

And although emotion recognition accuracy was a little lower for the autistic group, there was substantial overlap in ability between the two groups. Just a small subgroup of the autistic participants performed below the level of the non-autistic group.

Lastly, though the autistic participants responded more slowly, the study suggests that they were probably just acting more cautiously in the laboratory setting.

These findings challenge some common perceptions about autistic adults’ ability to recognize others’ emotions and their insight into their processing of emotions. The findings also demonstrate previously unacknowledged capabilities of many autistic people and remind us that autistic adults are not all the same.

 

Written by: Alex Liau
Published on 14 March 2023