Processing of emotion words by patients with autism spectrum disorders: evidence from reaction times and EEG.

Lartseva et al. (2014) asked adults with autism to read emotion words on a screen. They measured how fast each person pressed a key and also recorded brain waves with EEG.

The team wanted to see if behavior and brain signals told the same story about emotion-word processing.

Adults with autism hit the key just as quickly as non-autistic adults. The EEG told a different tale: the late positive brain wave never showed up for the autism group.

In plain words, the outside looked fine, but the inside processing was clearly different.

Yeh et al. (2026) ran the same EEG task with tweens and got almost the same missing late wave, but only for positive words. This extends the adult finding downward in age and shows valence matters.

Yuan et al. (2022) used rating scales instead of EEG and also saw surface-level success in autistic adults, giving a conceptual replication of the intact behavior.

Ganz et al. (2009) looked at attention capture by emotion words and found weaker capture in autism. That negative result dovetails with the missing late positivity: both point to dampened late-stage emotion processing even when early speed looks normal.

For BCBAs, normal response speed can hide atypical brain processing. When you teach feeling vocabulary, do not rely only on quick answers or correct labels. Add checks such as asking the learner to elaborate, use the word in a social story, or match it to body cues. If progress stalls, consider that the word may be processed differently at the neural level and adjust teaching intensity or add visual supports.