Non-autistic adults can recognize posed autistic facial expressions: Implications for internal representations of emotion.
Non-autistic adults can read autistic facial expressions just fine, so social breakdowns come from context and back-and-forth issues, not from a different emotional face code.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked 632 non-autistic adults to look at photos of faces.
Some faces were posed by autistic adults. Others were posed by non-autistic adults.
The viewers had to pick which emotion each face showed.
What they found
People guessed the autistic faces just as well as the non-autistic ones.
Angry autistic faces were even easier to read than angry non-autistic faces.
This tells us the two groups share the same basic emotion prototypes.
Why it matters
If a client’s face looks flat to you, don’t blame a different inner template.
Look at the room, the topic, and your own signals instead.
Teach reciprocal conversation skills and context cues.
Save time you might have spent on exaggerated facial drills.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autistic people report that their emotional expressions are sometimes misunderstood by non-autistic people. One explanation for these misunderstandings could be that the two neurotypes have different internal representations of emotion: Perhaps they have different expectations about what a facial expression showing a particular emotion looks like. In three well-powered studies with non-autistic college students in the United States (total N = 632), we investigated this possibility. In Study 1, participants recognized most facial expressions posed by autistic individuals more accurately than those posed by non-autistic individuals. Study 2 showed that one reason the autistic expressions were recognized more accurately was because they were better and more intense examples of the intended expressions than the non-autistic expressions. In Study 3, we used a set of expressions created by autistic and non-autistic individuals who could see their faces as they made the expressions, which could allow them to explicitly match the expression they produced with their internal representation of that emotional expression. Here, neither autistic expressions nor non-autistic expressions were consistently recognized more accurately. In short, these findings suggest that differences in internal representations of what emotional expressions look like are unlikely to play a major role in explaining why non-autistic people sometimes misunderstand the emotions autistic people are experiencing.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.2938