Can Neurotypical Individuals Read Autistic Facial Expressions? Atypical Production of Emotional Facial Expressions in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Autistic faces don’t send clear emotion signals to anyone, so check your assumptions and teach both expression and recognition skills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Grzadzinski et al. (2016) asked neurotypical adults to name the emotion shown in photographs.
Half of the photos showed neurotypical faces. The other half showed autistic faces.
Each face was supposed to look happy, sad, angry, or afraid.
What they found
Judges got the emotion right far less often when the face was autistic.
Even other autistic viewers struggled to read the same faces.
Each autistic person showed their own odd pattern; there was no single “autistic look.”
How this fits with other research
Sheppard et al. (2016) ran a near-copy study the same year. They used short video clips instead of still photos and found the same gap. Together the papers show the problem is real, not a fluke of method.
Soleiman et al. (2023) flipped the lens. They taught autistic children to read robot faces and the kids learned fast. This suggests the trouble is two-way: autistic expressions are hard to produce and hard to read, but both skills can be trained.
Brewer et al. (2023) asked autistic adults what response would comfort a sad friend. Most picked the same answers neurotypicals would; they just felt less sure. The production problem flagged by Rebecca et al. does not mean autistic people lack social knowledge—only that their faces may not broadcast it.
Why it matters
If you wait for a “typical” sad or happy face from an autistic client, you may mis-read them. Check your own bias: label the behavior you see, not the emotion you expect. Pair your student with both neurotypical and autistic partners so each side practices reading the other. When teaching expression skills, use video models and give the learner feedback on both recognizing and showing feelings. Small shifts like these lower the double-empathy wall the 2016 papers describe.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The difficulties encountered by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when interacting with neurotypical (NT, i.e. nonautistic) individuals are usually attributed to failure to recognize the emotions and mental states of their NT interaction partner. It is also possible, however, that at least some of the difficulty is due to a failure of NT individuals to read the mental and emotional states of ASD interaction partners. Previous research has frequently observed deficits of typical facial emotion recognition in individuals with ASD, suggesting atypical representations of emotional expressions. Relatively little research, however, has investigated the ability of individuals with ASD to produce recognizable emotional expressions, and thus, whether NT individuals can recognize autistic emotional expressions. The few studies which have investigated this have used only NT observers, making it impossible to determine whether atypical representations are shared among individuals with ASD, or idiosyncratic. This study investigated NT and ASD participants' ability to recognize emotional expressions produced by NT and ASD posers. Three posing conditions were included, to determine whether potential group differences are due to atypical cognitive representations of emotion, impaired understanding of the communicative value of expressions, or poor proprioceptive feedback. Results indicated that ASD expressions were recognized less well than NT expressions, and that this is likely due to a genuine deficit in the representation of typical emotional expressions in this population. Further, ASD expressions were equally poorly recognized by NT individuals and those with ASD, implicating idiosyncratic, rather than common, atypical representations of emotional expressions in ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1508