Impaired Recognition of Negative Facial Expressions is Partly Related to Facial Perception Deficits in Adolescents with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Payne et al. (2020) tested 30 high-functioning teens with ASD and 30 typical classmates. Each teen matched faces showing anger, fear, sadness, or happiness to word labels.

Researchers also gave a basic face-matching test. This let them check if emotion mistakes came from poor face perception or from reading feelings.

Even after scoring equally on face matching, the ASD group named negative faces wrong far more often. Happy faces caused almost no errors.

The gap stayed large for anger and fear; sadness was only slightly harder.

Fink et al. (2014) saw no emotion deficit once verbal IQ was held steady. Their kids were younger and the test used verbal skill as the control, not face perception. Different controls, different story.

Krüger et al. (2018) extend the same blind spot to body cues. Their adults with ASD rated happy point-light walkers as less intense and felt less sure, showing the trouble goes beyond faces.

Begeer et al. (2014) found younger ASD kids already struggled with relief and contentment—feelings that need "it could have been worse" thinking. Together, the three papers trace a line: weak negative-emotion reading starts in childhood, stays into adolescence for faces, and later spills into body movement.

When a teen with ASD seems blunt or misses social cues, check negative faces first. Add extra teaching trials for anger and fear. Use video freeze-frames, draw attention to eyebrow angle and mouth shape, and give immediate yes/no feedback. Five minutes of this drill at the start of each social-skills group can cut later errors in real peer talk.