Can adults with autism spectrum disorders infer what happened to someone from their emotional response?
Adults with autism can stare at eyes yet still fail to work backward from happy faces to real-world events.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sherwell et al. (2014) asked the adults with autism and 24 typical adults to watch short videos.
Each clip showed a person getting a gift and reacting with happy, fake-happy, or sad face.
The job: guess which gift the person really got based only on that emotional reaction.
Eye-tracking gear checked where each viewer looked while deciding.
What they found
The autism group picked the right gift only 55 % of the time, far below the 80 % hit rate of typical adults.
They missed both real smiles and polite fake smiles, but they could spot sad faces fine.
Even though they looked at the eyes just as much, eye contact did not help them solve the puzzle.
How this fits with other research
Payne et al. (2020) saw a similar gap in teens with autism reading negative faces, showing the trouble lasts across ages and emotions.
Begeer et al. (2014) found the same backward reasoning problem in children, so the skill is shaky early and stays shaky.
Fink et al. (2014) looks like a clash: their autistic kids matched faces to words once verbal IQ was counted.
The difference is the task. Elian asked, "Is this face happy?" Sarah asked, "What just happened to make this face?" The second question needs social detective work, not just face naming.
Why it matters
Do not trust eye contact as proof that your client understands the emotion.
When you teach social skills, add lessons on reading fake versus real smiles and on working backward from feelings to events.
Use video clips, pause at the reaction, and ask, "What just happened?" until clients can link the face to the hidden story.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Can adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) infer what happened to someone from their emotional response? Millikan has argued that in everyday life, others' emotions are most commonly used to work out the antecedents of behavior, an ability termed retrodictive mindreading. As those with ASD show difficulties interpreting others' emotions, we predicted that these individuals would have difficulty with retrodictive mindreading. Sixteen adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome and 19 typically developing adults viewed 21 video clips of people reacting to one of three gifts (chocolate, monopoly money, or a homemade novelty) and then inferred what gift the recipient received and the emotion expressed by that person. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they viewed the videos. Results showed that participants with ASD were only less accurate when inferring who received a chocolate or homemade gift. This difficulty was not due to lack of understanding what emotions were appropriate in response to each gift, as both groups gave consistent gift and emotion inferences significantly above chance (genuine positive for chocolate and feigned positive for homemade). Those with ASD did not look significantly less to the eyes of faces in the videos, and looking to the eyes did not correlate with accuracy on the task. These results suggest that those with ASD are less accurate when retrodicting events involving recognition of genuine and feigned positive emotions, and challenge claims that lack of attention to the eyes causes emotion recognition difficulties in ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2014 · doi:10.1002/aur.1351