Can gaze avoidance explain why individuals with Asperger's syndrome can't recognise emotions from facial expressions?
Adults with Asperger's look at eyes just fine—skip gaze-fixing drills and target emotion knowledge instead.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wuang et al. (2012) watched adults with Asperger's while they looked at faces.
The team tracked eye movements to see if the adults avoided the eyes.
They also tested how well the adults named the feelings shown on the faces.
What they found
The Asperger group named fewer feelings correctly.
Yet their eyes landed on the eye region just as often as typical adults.
Gaze avoidance could not explain the emotion trouble.
How this fits with other research
McLennan et al. (2008) saw the same null result in adults with ASD, a direct replication.
Lemons et al. (2015) extended the null to preschoolers using pupil size, again finding no gaze aversion.
Two papers seem to clash. Song et al. (2016) showed ASD kids under-use the eyes for fear, and Kleinert et al. (2007) found autistic adults lean on mouth cues. The clash fades when you note those studies measure how information is used, not whether eyes are avoided.
Why it matters
Stop teaching eye-contact drills to fix emotion skills in Asperger adults. The eyes are not scary; the problem lies elsewhere. Spend your minutes on emotion labeling, cross-modal matching, or alexithymia screens instead.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Research has shown that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have difficulties recognising emotions from facial expressions. Since eye contact is important for accurate emotion recognition, and individuals with ASD tend to avoid eye contact, this tendency for gaze aversion has been proposed as an explanation for the emotion recognition deficit. This explanation was investigated using a newly developed emotion and mental state recognition task. Individuals with Asperger's Syndrome were less accurate at recognising emotions and mental states, but did not show evidence of gaze avoidance compared to individuals without Asperger's Syndrome. This suggests that the way individuals with Asperger's Syndrome look at faces cannot account for the difficulty they have recognising expressions.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2012 · doi:10.1007/s10803-011-1283-0