Evaluating posed and evoked facial expressions of emotion from adults with autism spectrum disorder.
Autistic adults make intense but highly readable faces, so shift teaching from ‘how to look’ to ‘when and why to use’ each expression.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked adults with autism and neurotypical adults to pose happy, sad, angry, and fearful faces.
They also showed the adults short video clips to evoke real emotions. Trained raters later judged how intense and natural each face looked.
What they found
Autistic adults made faces that looked more intense and less natural. Yet judges correctly named the autistic faces more often, especially angry ones.
The study found mixed results: atypical production but better recognition.
How this fits with other research
Rabin et al. (2019) conceptually replicated the posed-task with computer coding. They also saw different facial movements in autism, adding a social-skills link.
Goulardins et al. (2013) seems to disagree. They found adolescents with autism showed weaker brain and gaze responses to emotional faces and poorer recognition. The gap likely reflects age: teen brains versus practiced adult skills.
Van der Donck et al. (2023) recorded brain waves and found almost no adult-group differences. Together with the target paper, this suggests adult autistic faces work fine for quick recognition even if they look unusual.
Why it matters
If you teach social skills to autistic adults, do not assume their facial signals are unclear. Their angry face is read faster than a neurotypical one. Instead, target timing and context: when to show the face and how to read the other person’s reaction. Use video modeling with real autistic models—clients will see faces they can actually produce.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Though many studies have examined facial affect perception by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), little research has investigated how facial expressivity in ASD is perceived by others. Here, naïve female observers (n = 38) judged the intensity, naturalness and emotional category of expressions produced by adults with ASD (n = 6) and typically developing (TD) adults (n = 6) in both a posed condition and an evoked condition in which emotions were naturalistically elicited and validated. ASD expressions were rated as more intense and less natural than TD expressions but contrary to prediction were identified with greater accuracy, an effect driven primarily by angry expressions. Naturalness ratings of evoked expressions were positively associated with identification accuracy for TD but not ASD individuals. Collectively, these findings highlight differences, but not a reduction, in facial expressivity in ASD that do not hinder emotion recognition accuracy but may affect social interaction quality.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2015 · doi:10.1007/s10803-014-2194-7