Selective attention to facial emotion and identity in children with autism: evidence for global identity and local emotion.

Song et al. (2012) watched high-functioning autistic kids while they matched faces.

The faces showed both a feeling (happy, sad, angry) and a person’s identity.

The team asked: does the feeling slow down identity choices?

Feelings did get in the way.

Kids were slower and less steady when emotion and identity were mixed.

The study only looked at interference; it did not try to fix it.

Begeer et al. (2006) saw a way out. They told autistic kids why emotion faces mattered. With that hint, attention gaps vanished.

Torelli et al. (2023) seems to clash. They found no accuracy drop across ages and modalities—only slower speed. The gap fades when you test a wider age range and give more time.

Xu et al. (2022) deepens the story. Brain waves showed autistic people catch single emotion cues but miss longer emotion patterns. The local-catch/global-miss pattern matches the face task here.

You now know emotion can jam identity recognition in high-functioning learners. Before you teach face names, cut emotional noise—use calm faces first, then add mild feelings. Give the child a clear social reason for looking, just like Sander et al. did, and allow extra response time as N et al. suggest. These small setup tweaks can keep therapy smooth.