Metacognitive monitoring and the hypercorrection effect in autism and the general population: Relation to autism(-like) traits and mindreading.
Autistic adults accurately sense when their emotion answers are right or wrong, so use their confidence to guide practice instead of teaching metacognition from scratch.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McGarty et al. (2018) asked 36 autistic and 36 non-autistic adults to name the emotion on faces.
After each answer the adults rated how sure they were that they were right.
The team then checked if confidence matched real accuracy.
What they found
Autistic adults named fewer emotions correctly and took longer.
Yet their confidence ratings lined up with their real accuracy just as well as the non-autistic group.
They knew when they were right and when they were wrong.
How this fits with other research
Wojcik et al. (2014) saw the same pattern in autistic teens using memory tasks. Teens adjusted study time based on how well they thought they learned, showing the skill starts early.
Stagg et al. (2022) seems to disagree: autistic teens missed hidden emotions when context was added. The difference is task, not monitoring. Steven tested reading context cues; M tested awareness of own right-wrong answers. Both can be true.
Smith et al. (2008) foreshadowed this. Autistic adults tracked their own actions fine even while failing mentalizing tasks. Together the papers show self-monitoring stays intact while other social skills vary.
Why it matters
You do not need to teach autistic clients how to judge their own performance. Instead, give them immediate feedback and let them adjust. Ask, "How sure are you?" after each trial, then show the answer. Their own ratings will guide learning and build independence.
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Join Free →After each emotion-ID trial, ask the client to rate confidence 1-5, then give the correct label; use mismatches to prompt review and matches to reinforce self-awareness.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Emotion recognition difficulties are considered to contribute to social-communicative problems for autistic individuals and awareness of such difficulties may be critical for the identification and pursuit of strategies that will mitigate their adverse effects. We examined metacognitive awareness of face emotion recognition responses in autistic (N = 63) and non-autistic (N = 67) adults across (a) static, dynamic and social face emotion stimuli, (b) free- and forced-report response formats, and (c) four different sets of the six "basic" and six "complex" emotions. Within-individual relationships between recognition accuracy and post-recognition confidence provided no indication that autistic individuals were poorer at discriminating correct from incorrect recognition responses than non-autistic individuals, although both groups exhibited marked inter-individual variability. Although the autistic group was less accurate and slower to recognize emotions, confidence-accuracy calibration analyses provided no evidence of reduced sensitivity on their part to fluctuations in their emotion recognition performance. Across variations in stimulus type, response format and emotion, increases in accuracy were associated with progressively higher confidence, with similar calibration curves for both groups. Calibration curves for both groups were, however, characterized by overconfidence at the higher confidence levels (i.e., overall accuracy less than the average confidence level), with the non-autistic group contributing more decisions with 90%-100% confidence. Comparisons of slow and fast responders provided no evidence of a "hard-easy" effect-the tendency to exhibit overconfidence during hard tasks and underconfidence during easy tasks-suggesting that autistic individuals' slower recognition responding may reflect a strategic difference rather than a processing speed limitation. LAY SUMMARY: It is generally considered that autistic individuals may have difficulty recognizing other people's facial emotions. However, little is known about their awareness of any emotion recognition difficulties they may experience. This study indicates that, although there is considerable individual variability, autistic adults were as sensitive to variations in the accuracy of their recognition of others' emotions as their non-autistic peers.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2018 · doi:10.1177/1362361316680178