Nonverbal expression in autism of Asperger type.
Gaze avoidance in Asperger autism shows up as reduced looking when others speak, not total avoidance — target joint attention during conversational turn-taking.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Tantam et al. (1993) watched adults with Asperger-type autism talk with an interviewer.
They timed eye contact to see when the adults looked away.
A small control group without autism did the same chat.
What they found
The Asperger group looked away more, but only while the interviewer spoke.
When they talked, their gaze time looked normal.
This shows the issue is missing the social cue to look while listening, not total eye avoidance.
How this fits with other research
Freeth et al. (2019) saw the same dip in live eye-tracking: autistic adults avoid the eyes when the partner stares straight at them.
Spanoudis et al. (2011) found the same adults also look less at still photos of eyes, linking the gap to weaker face reading skills.
Doherty-Sneddon et al. (2013) seems to disagree: kids with autism avert gaze while thinking just like typical kids.
The clash clears up when you note the phase of talk. D et al. watched the listening phase; Gwyneth et al. watched the thinking phase.
Both papers agree autistic people do not avoid eyes all the time — timing and context matter.
Why it matters
You can stop teaching “look at me” as a fixed rule. Instead, prompt eye contact right before you speak and let clients look away while they plan an answer. Use slightly averted gaze yourself, as Freeth et al. (2019) suggest, to keep social attention high without stress.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Short unstructured social interactions between a volunteer interviewer, an adult with autism of Asperger type, and a control subject with a schizoid personality disorder were video-recorded. Asperger subjects tended to look less at the other person, to make more self-stimulatory gestures, and to look at the interviewer significantly less than normal subjects, and substantially less than schizoid subjects, during the periods when the interviewer was vocalizing although there were no such differences when the interviewer was listening. We suggest that the gaze avoidance of autism may in actuality be a lack of expected gaze (e.g., gaze when the other person is talking) rather than an absolute avoidance, and suggest that a lifelong absence of gaze response to social cues including speech could explain a number of the developmental features of autism including lack of joint attention with others, lack of understanding and affective response to others, and poor discrimination of facial expressions.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1993 · doi:10.1007/BF01066422