Face processing abilities in relatives of individuals with ASD.
Parents and siblings of autistic clients show mild face-processing hiccups that echo autism traits, so pace social tasks accordingly.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wallace et al. (2010) tested parents and adult brothers or sisters of people with autism.
Everyone completed three computer tasks: match similar faces, name fear or disgust from photos, and judge where a face was looking.
Their scores were stacked against adults who had no autism in the family.
What they found
Relatives did worse on every task, but the gaps were small.
They mixed up faces more often, read fear and disgust less accurately, and misjudged eye direction.
The pattern looked like a faint copy of the full autism profile.
How this fits with other research
Faja et al. (2009) saw the same face-matching slips in adults who actually have autism; Simon shows the weakness also hides in their unaffected relatives.
Song et al. (2016) found that kids with autism miss fear cues in the eyes; Simon finds the same micro-deficit in their parents and siblings, strengthening the idea of a heritable marker.
Adams et al. (2024) later recorded brain waves in preschool autism siblings and saw a smaller face-sensitive N170 wave, giving neural proof for the behavioral signs Simon first measured.
Together the studies trace a continuous line: from toddler brain response, to adult sibling behavior, to the full clinical picture in autism itself.
Why it matters
If parents or siblings struggle with quick face or emotion calls, social skills training may move too fast for them.
Slow down instruction, give clear verbal labels, and check understanding before prompting the client.
These tiny deficits also remind us that social cognition runs in families—so celebrate small wins when relatives join therapy games.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Show emotion cards for two extra seconds and ask the parent to name the feeling before the child responds.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show difficulties identifying familiar faces, recognizing emotional expressions and judging eye-gaze direction. Recent research suggests that relatives of individuals with AS also show impairments in some aspects of face processing but no study has comprehensively assessed the nature and extent of face-processing difficulties in a group of relatives. This study compared the performance of 22 parents/adult siblings of individuals with ASD ("relatives" group), 26 adults with ASD, and 26 typically developing adults on tasks of face discrimination, facial expression recognition and judging eye-gaze direction. Relatives of individuals with ASD were less able to discriminate subtle differences between faces than typically developing adults, but were more sensitive to such differences than adults with ASD. Furthermore, relatives were significantly worse at identifying expressions of fear and disgust than typically developing adults and failed to show the typical sensitivity to direct compared with averted eye-gaze direction--a strikingly similar pattern to that observed in adults with ASD. These findings show that atypical patterns of face processing are found in some relatives of individuals with ASD and suggest that these difficulties may represent a cognitive endophenotype.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2010 · doi:10.1002/aur.161