A selective impairment in extracting fearful information from another's eyes in Autism.
Autistic kids under-use the eyes to spot fear—train them to look there.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Song et al. (2016) watched kids' eyes while they looked at faces. Some kids had autism, some did not. The team asked: do kids with autism use the eye area to spot fear, happy, or angry feelings?
They used eye-tracking cameras to see where each child looked on the face.
What they found
Kids with autism used eye data to judge happy and angry faces the same as typical kids. But for fear, they used the eyes far less. Missing eye fear cues could make scary faces harder to read.
How this fits with other research
Kleinert et al. (2007) first showed autistic adults look more at mouths than eyes for any emotion. Yongning narrows that gap: the mouth bias is worst when reading fear.
Doughty et al. (2015) found autistic kids also show weaker fear mimicry in their own faces. Together, the two studies point to a fear-specific signal problem—both seeing and showing fear.
McLennan et al. (2008) seemed to disagree: autistic adults looked at eyes just as much as controls for simple emotions. The clash fades when you note age and emotion type. Yongning tested children and singled out fear; D et al. tested adults and used simple happy or sad faces. Eye gaze may grow with age or depend on the feeling tested.
Why it matters
When you teach facial emotion, spotlight the eye area for fear. Pause videos at wide-eyed frames and have learners point to the eyes. Pair that with practice making calm-down requests so they learn to act on the fear signal they often miss.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →During emotion charades, cover the lower face with a card and ask, 'What do these eyes tell us?'
02At a glance
03Original abstract
An atypical pattern of facial expression processing in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been discussed in previous studies. In this study, we systematically examined the hypothesis of selective abnormality of gaze pattern of in children with ASD using three emotion judgment "bubble" tasks. In this study, we used a data-driven driven technique, referred to as "Bubbles" to examine the hypothesis that ASD children will not show a general but rather a selective abnormality in extracting eyes information expressed by different emotions. Results indicated that similar to non-ASD individuals, ASD individuals used information from other people's eyes to judge happiness and anger. In contrast, ASD individuals showed a remarkable reduction in processing the eye region in fearful face, together with enhanced processing of the mouth, compared with the control group. The results suggest that a selective abnormality in extracting eyes information of fearful face without abnormality in processing eyes area of other basic facial emotions is a key and characteristic feature of autistic facial cognition. To our knowledge, this finding regarding the selective abnormality in extracting fearful information from another's eyes in ASDs has never been reported in previous studies and the information gathered as a part of this pilot research project has important clinical implications for social information processing training. For example, as children with ASD are more vulnerable to fear processing, training related to fear should be stressed. Autism Res 2016, 9: 1002-1011. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1583