Investigating implicit emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder across age groups: A cross-modal emotional priming study.
Autistic people pick up hidden emotions in voices and songs as well as anyone, but their skill grows differently with age.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Perry et al. (2024) tested how autistic people react to hidden feelings in speech and song.
They used a priming task. A happy or sad voice or melody played quickly. Then a face popped up. The team measured how fast people judged the face.
Participants were autistic and neurotypical people of different ages.
What they found
Overall, both groups showed the same priming effect. Hidden emotion in voices and songs sped up face judgments equally.
Yet the way this skill grew with age differed between the groups. Autistic people followed a unique path.
How this fits with other research
Wehman et al. (1989) first showed that autistic teens score lower on emotion words in the BPVS. That vocabulary gap looked like a clear deficit.
The new study flips the picture. At the automatic, below-awareness level, autistic people catch emotion cues just fine. The trouble may sit higher up—when they must name or talk about feelings.
Tavassoli et al. (2012) and Bang et al. (2013) add support. Their autistic kids used fewer feeling words in stories and chats. Together the papers trace a line: input is intact, output is strained.
Why it matters
Do not assume clients who skip feeling words also miss feeling cues. Use songs, tones, and vocal play to prime mood before asking them to label it. Start with quick listening games, then move to naming.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Cumulating evidence suggests that atypical emotion processing in autism may generalize across different stimulus domains. However, this evidence comes from studies examining explicit emotion recognition. It remains unclear whether domain-general atypicality also applies to implicit emotion processing in autism and its implication for real-world social communication. To investigate this, we employed a novel cross-modal emotional priming task to assess implicit emotion processing of spoken/sung words (primes) through their influence on subsequent emotional judgment of faces/face-like objects (targets). We assessed whether implicit emotional priming differed between 38 autistic and 38 neurotypical individuals across age groups as a function of prime and target type. Results indicated no overall group differences across age groups, prime types, and target types. However, differential, domain-specific developmental patterns emerged for the autism and neurotypical groups. For neurotypical individuals, speech but not song primed the emotional judgment of faces across ages. This speech-orienting tendency was not observed across ages in the autism group, as priming of speech on faces was not seen in autistic adults. These results outline the importance of the delicate weighting between speech- versus song-orientation in implicit emotion processing throughout development, providing more nuanced insights into the emotion processing profile of autistic individuals.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1002/aur.3124