Selective Impairment of Basic Emotion Recognition in People with Autism: Discrimination Thresholds for Recognition of Facial Expressions of Varying Intensities.
Kids with autism need facial expressions of anger, disgust, and fear to be noticeably stronger before they recognize them correctly—target these subtler intensities during social skills training.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Song et al. (2018) tested how clearly facial expressions must look before kids can name the emotion. They showed children with autism and typical peers faces that were 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, or 100% emotional. The kids picked one of six emotion words for each face.
The study used a quiet lab room and a computer screen. No teaching or feedback was given. The goal was to find the lowest intensity each child needed to get the emotion right most of the time.
What they found
Children with autism needed anger, disgust, and fear faces to be about one step stronger than typical kids before they could label them correctly. Happy, sad, and surprise faces showed no group difference.
The gap was small but steady across participants. It means subtle versions of these three negative emotions are harder for autistic kids to catch.
How this fits with other research
The result lines up with Evers et al. (2015), who also saw a small global lag in reading dynamic facial emotions. Both studies point to a gentle, not severe, face-reading difference in autism.
Two earlier papers, Castelli (2005) and Fink et al. (2014), found no emotion-recognition deficit once verbal skills were counted. The key difference is those studies used full-strength faces. Yongning’s intensity-graded faces reveal a mild weakness that standard faces hide.
Poljac et al. (2013) extends the same pattern to adults with high autistic traits, showing the intensity hurdle exists across age and diagnosis boundaries.
Why it matters
When you teach social skills, don’t wait for dramatic frowns or scowls. Practice with slight, real-world intensities of anger, disgust, and fear. Use video clips, peer faces, or emoji that blend 40-60% emotion. Prompt and reinforce quick, correct labels at these lower intensities to build fluent, everyday emotion detection.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by early onset qualitative impairments in reciprocal social development. However, whether individuals with ASD exhibit impaired recognition of facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions is debatable. To investigate subtle deficits in facial emotion recognition, we asked 14 children diagnosed with high-functioning autism (HFA)/AS and 17 typically developing peers to complete a new highly sensitive test of facial emotion recognition. The test stimuli comprised faces expressing increasing degrees of emotional intensity that slowly changed from a neutral to a full-intensity happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, or fear expression. We assessed individual differences in the intensity of stimuli required to make accurate judgments about emotional expressions. We found that, different emotions had different identification thresholds and the two groups were generally similar in terms of the sequence of discrimination threshold of six basic expressions. It was easier for individuals in both groups to identify emotions that were relatively fully expressed (e.g., intensity > 50%). Compared with control participants, children with ASD generally required stimuli with significantly greater intensity for the correct identification of anger, disgust, and fear expressions. These results suggest that individuals with ASD do not have a general but rather a selective impairment in basic emotion recognition.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2018 · doi:10.1007/s10803-017-3428-2