Expression Recognition Difficulty Is Associated with Social But Not Attention-to-Detail Autistic Traits and Reflects Both Alexithymia and Perceptual Difficulty.
Social-communication autistic traits drag down face-reading, and alexithymia explains part of the slip.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bothe et al. (2019) asked 90 college students to name and match facial expressions. All students were neurotypical. The team also gave them two short surveys. One measured social-communication quirks. The other measured love of tiny details.
The researchers wanted to know which set of traits best predicted poor scores on the face task. They also tested two possible reasons for the trouble: alexithymia (trouble feeling and naming one's own emotions) and basic perceptual difficulty.
What they found
Only social-communication traits mattered. Students who agreed with statements like "I find it hard to make friends" scored worse on both naming and matching faces. Attention-to-detail traits showed zero link.
Half of the social-trait effect ran through alexithymia. The other half ran through plain perceptual struggle. In short, social autistic traits hurt face reading, and alexithymia is part of the story.
How this fits with other research
Mosalmannejad et al. (2025) repeated the idea with pain faces. They also found that alexithymia, not autistic traits alone, cut recognition accuracy. This backs the target study in a new emotion set.
Hartston et al. (2023) moved from traits to diagnosed adults. They showed weaker face recognition and smaller face-inversion effects, proving the perceptual deficit is real in ASD, not just in trait carriers.
Zappullo et al. (2023) looks like a clash but isn't. They found that attention-to-detail helps mental-rotation skill. Ellen et al. found it does nothing for face emotion. The lesson: the same trait helps visual puzzles yet leaves social vision untouched.
Why it matters
When a client struggles to read faces, check social-communication traits and alexithymia first. Don't assume the client needs broader visual training; the issue is social-emotional, not detail-oriented. Pair your emotion-ID lessons with feeling-labeling work to tackle alexithymia. And keep perceptual supports—like slower presentation or contrast boosts—on the table.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autistic people often show difficulty with facial expression recognition. However, the degree of difficulty varies widely, which might reflect varying symptom profiles. We examined three domains of autistic traits in the typical population and found that more autistic-like social skills were associated with greater difficulty labelling expressions, and more autistic-like communication was associated with greater difficulty labelling and perceptually discriminating between expressions. There were no associations with autistic-like attention to detail. We also found that labelling, but not perceptual, difficulty was mediated by alexithymia. We found no evidence that labelling or perceptual difficulty was mediated by weakened adaptive coding. Results suggest expression recognition varies between the sub-clinical expressions of autistic symptom domains and reflects both co-occurring alexithymia and perceptual difficulty.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2019 · doi:10.1007/s10803-019-04158-y