Emotion Perception or Social Cognitive Complexity: What Drives Face Processing Deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorder?
Face-processing trouble in autism is about reading feelings, not social rules—so teach emotions directly.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested the adults with autism and 36 typical adults.
Everyone tried two computer tasks.
One task showed emotional faces.
The other showed faces in a tricky social game with no feelings involved.
Both tasks used the same face pictures.
This let the researchers ask: is the autism group worse only when emotion is in the mix?
What they found
Adults with autism scored lower on the emotional-face task.
On the social-but-not-emotional task, both groups scored the same.
The gap stayed even when the team controlled for IQ.
This points to emotion perception, not general social complexity, as the weak spot.
How this fits with other research
Maddox et al. (2015) saw the same pattern one year earlier.
They showed that poor emotion reading partly explains low socialization scores in autism.
van Timmeren et al. (2016) now pin the problem to emotion itself, not just hard social rules.
O’Connor et al. (2020) took the next step.
They used stimulus-equivalence drills to teach kids with autism to match faces to feelings.
All three kids learned, and two could even name new feelings without direct teaching.
Together the papers form a line: find the emotion gap, then teach it.
Why it matters
If social errors come from missed emotions, skip broad social-skills drills.
Target emotion recognition first.
Use brief face-to-feeling trials, teach subtle cues like eyebrow angle, and check generalization with new photos.
Track data session-by-session; quick gains here can unlock smoother peer talks later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Some, but not all, relevant studies have revealed face processing deficits among those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In particular, deficits are revealed in face processing tasks that involve emotion perception. The current study examined whether either deficits in processing emotional expression or deficits in processing social cognitive complexity drive face processing deficits in ASD. We tested adults with and without ASD on a battery of face processing tasks that varied with respect to emotional expression processing and social cognitive complexity. Results revealed significant group differences on tasks involving emotional expression processing, but typical performance on a non-emotional but socially complex task. These results support an emotion processing rather than a social complexity explanation for face processing deficits in ASD.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2016 · doi:10.1007/s10803-015-2606-3