Evidence for impaired verbal identification but intact nonverbal recognition of fearful body postures in Asperger's syndrome.
Clients with Asperger’s can read fearful body language with their eyes but not with their words—train the label separately.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked adults with Asperger’s to look at photos of scared body poses.
The adults had to match the poses without words and later name the feeling out loud.
A control group did the same tasks so the team could compare answers.
What they found
The Asperger group matched scared poses just as well as controls when no talking was needed.
When they had to say “fear,” they scored much lower than controls.
They were slower at matching angry poses, but face-reading scores looked the same for both groups.
How this fits with other research
O'Connor (2007) extends this idea: adults with Asperger’s also miss when a happy face is paired with an angry voice.
Doi et al. (2013) conceptually replicates the verbal gap; their subjects struggled to name low-intensity angry or sad faces and voices.
Legiša et al. (2013) seems to disagree at first glance. Their autistic kids showed normal facial and body signs of disgust to smells but still failed when asked to name the feeling. The studies differ only in the cue used—body poses versus odors—so both point to the same verbal-label bottleneck, not a real contradiction.
Why it matters
You may see a client copy a scared stance perfectly yet still say “I don’t know” when you ask what it means. Check both channels: non-verbal recognition and spoken labels. Build lessons that pair body cards with the word “fear,” then practice saying it fast. This small tweak can close the gap between what they sense and what they can report.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
While most studies of emotion recognition in Asperger's Syndrome (AS) have focused solely on the verbal decoding of affective states, the current research employed the novel technique of using both nonverbal matching and verbal labeling tasks to examine the decoding of emotional body postures and facial expressions. AS participants performed as accurately as controls at matching fear body postures, but were significantly less accurate than controls verbally identifying these same stimuli. This profile arguably indicates that that while the AS participants were aware that the fear body posture stimuli represented a distinct emotion, they were unsure as to which specific emotion. In addition, the AS participants took significantly longer than the controls to respond to anger body posture stimuli on a matching task. However, in contrast to previous studies, AS and control participants did not differ significantly in their responses to facial expression stimuli, in terms of either accuracy or response times.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2013 · doi:10.1007/s10803-012-1715-5