Reading Faces for Information about Words and Emotions in Adolescents with Autism.
Autistic teens lip-read better than typical peers but miss eye-based emotions, so start social-skills drills with mouth cues and mild faces.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked autistic and typical teens to watch short clips of faces.
Some clips showed only the mouth area while a person mouthed words.
Other clips showed only the eye area while a person showed feelings.
The teens had to say what word or emotion they saw.
What they found
Autistic teens read the mouth clips better than typical teens.
They read the eye clips worse than typical teens.
When the eyes were hidden, both groups scored the same.
The mouth skill and eye weakness evened out.
How this fits with other research
Fink et al. (2014) saw no emotion gap once verbal skill was matched.
Their kids had higher verbal scores, so the task was easier.
Payne et al. (2020) still found a negative-emotion gap in similar teens.
They used only negative faces, showing the eye weakness is real for fear and anger.
Song et al. (2018) added that autistic kids need stronger facial cues.
They had to turn anger, fear, and disgust up higher before kids got it right.
Why it matters
Use mouth cues when you teach new words or speech reading.
Cover or fade eye cues if emotion drills feel too hard at first.
Pick calm, clear faces and slowly add softer, mixed emotions.
Check verbal level before you decide a teen cannot read faces.
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Join Free →Begin an emotion-matching game using large mouth-only cards, then slowly zoom out to show eyes once the teen scores 80% for two rounds.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Studies of explicit processing of facial expressions by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have found a variety of deficits and preserved abilities compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. However, little attention has been paid to their implicit processing abilities for emotional facial expressions. The question has also been raised whether preferential attention to the mouth region of a speaker's face by ASD individuals has resulted in a relative lipreading expertise. We present data on implicit processing of pseudo-dynamic facial emotions and visual speech in adolescents with autism. We compared 25 ASD and 25 TD participants on their ability to recreate the sequences of four dynamic emotional facial expressions (happy, sad, disgust, fear) as well as four spoken words (with, bath, thumb, watch) using six still images taken from a video sequence. Typical adolescents were significantly better at recreating the dynamic properties of emotional expressions than those of facial speech, while the autism group showed the reverse accuracy pattern. For Experiment 2 we obscured the eye region of the stimuli and found no significant difference between the 22 adolescents with ASD and 22 TD controls. Fearful faces achieved the highest accuracy results among the emotions in both groups.
Research in autism spectrum disorders, 2008 · doi:10.1016/j.rasd.2008.02.004