Intact mirror mechanisms for automatic facial emotions in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.
Autistic kids copy faces just fine, but the copy does not turn into felt empathy.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Schulte-Rüther et al. (2017) watched 36 autistic kids and 36 typical kids copy faces on a screen.
They used tiny sensors to catch eyebrow, cheek, and mouth movements.
The task ran in a quiet lab while kids sat at a computer.
What they found
Both groups copied happy, sad, and angry faces at the same speed and strength.
The mirror system in the face muscles worked fine in autism.
But only the typical kids showed a link between copying faces and feeling what others feel.
How this fits with other research
Crippa et al. (2013) saw autistic kids could imitate yet failed to ramp up copying after emotional primes.
That earlier finding looked like broken mimicry, but Martin shows the basic motor step is intact.
Nijs et al. (2016) found autistic kids got less boost from their own smiles during cartoons.
Together the three papers paint one picture: the face muscles copy on cue, but the emotional payoff never arrives.
Kong et al. (2025) adds a twist: blurry vision can slow emotion gaze in autism, so check eyesight before you judge mimicry skills.
Why it matters
You can stop drilling simple facial imitation with autistic learners.
Their mirror neurons fire; the gap is higher up.
Shift targets to linking the copied face to an emotion word or consequence.
Add vision screening to your intake so poor eyesight does not hide good mimicry.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
It has been suggested that an early deficit in the human mirror neuron system (MNS) is an important feature of autism. Recent findings related to simple hand and finger movements do not support a general dysfunction of the MNS in autism. Studies investigating facial actions (e.g., emotional expressions) have been more consistent, however, mostly relied on passive observation tasks. We used a new variant of a compatibility task for the assessment of automatic facial mimicry responses that allowed for simultaneous control of attention to facial stimuli. We used facial electromyography in 18 children and adolescents with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 18 typically developing controls (TDCs). We observed a robust compatibility effect in ASD, that is, the execution of a facial expression was facilitated if a congruent facial expression was observed. Time course analysis of RT distributions and comparison to a classic compatibility task (symbolic Simon task) revealed that the facial compatibility effect appeared early and increased with time, suggesting fast and sustained activation of motor codes during observation of facial expressions. We observed a negative correlation of the compatibility effect with age across participants and in ASD, and a positive correlation between self-rated empathy and congruency for smiling faces in TDC but not in ASD. This pattern of results suggests that basic motor mimicry is intact in ASD, but is not associated with complex social cognitive abilities such as emotion understanding and empathy. Autism Res 2017, 10: 298-310. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1654