Autism and emotional face-viewing.
Young people with autism scan happy faces with more eye and less mouth time, so tailor social skills drills by emotion and age.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Åsberg Johnels et al. (2017) watched where kids, teens, and adults looked when faces showed happy, angry, or neutral feelings.
They used eye-tracking cameras while each person viewed the same set of emotional faces.
The team compared gaze patterns between people with autism and same-age peers without autism.
What they found
Young people with autism looked less at the mouth and more at the eyes when faces were happy.
Adults with autism only showed less eye focus when the faces stayed neutral.
The results were mixed: gaze changed with both age and emotion type.
How this fits with other research
Ma et al. (2021) pooled 173 eye-tracking studies and confirmed that reduced eye looking is universal in autism, but mouth looking grows with age.
Pan et al. (2025) seems to disagree: preschoolers with autism looked less at social-emotional areas. The clash fades when you note their kids were younger and more severely affected.
Wang et al. (2023) extends the story by showing that an active face-naming game can boost eye gaze in preschoolers, hinting that the pattern is not fixed.
Song et al. (2016) adds that children with autism mainly miss fear cues in the eyes, matching the current finding that emotion type matters.
Why it matters
When you run social skills groups, match the target to the emotion. If you want better happy-face reading, prompt mouth focus for kids and eye focus for adults. Use active tasks like naming the face to pull gaze up. Track fear separately—it may need its own eye-cue drills.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Atypical patterns of face-scanning in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may contribute to difficulties in social interactions, but there is little agreement regarding what exactly characterizes face-viewing in ASD. In addition, little research has examined how face-viewing is modulated by the emotional expression of the stimuli, in individuals with or without ASD. We used eye-tracking to explore viewing patterns during perception of dynamic emotional facial expressions in relatively large groups of individuals with (n = 57) and without ASD (n = 58) and examined diagnostic- and age-related effects, after subgrouping children and adolescents (≤18 years), on the one hand, and adults (>18 years), on the other. Results showed that children/adolescents with ASD fixated the mouth of happy and angry faces less than their typically developing (TD) peers, and conversely looked more to the eyes of happy faces. Moreover, while all groups fixated the mouth in happy faces more than in other expressions, children/adolescents with ASD did relatively less so. Correlation analysis showed a similar lack of relative orientation towards the mouth of smiling faces in TD children/adolescents with high autistic traits, as measured by the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Among adults, participants with ASD only attended less to the eyes for neutral faces. Our study shows that the emotional content of a face influences gaze behaviour, and that this effect is not fully developed in children/adolescents with ASD. Interestingly, this lack of differentiation observed in the younger ASD group was also seen in younger TD individuals with higher AQ scores. Autism Res 2017, 10: 901-910. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1730