Speeded reasoning moderates the inverse relationship between autistic traits and emotion recognition.
Quick logical thinking can cancel out emotion-recognition gaps in verbally fluent adults with high autistic traits.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Alex et al. (2020) asked adults to spot emotions from faces and voices. They also gave everyone a quick logic puzzle to measure speeded reasoning.
Some adults had an autism diagnosis. Others were neurotypical but scored high on autistic traits. All spoke fluently and had average or above IQ.
What they found
Overall, higher autistic traits meant worse emotion recognition. But the rule changed for people who solved the logic puzzles fast.
Fast reasoners with high traits scored just as well as low-trait adults. Slow reasoners with high traits scored lowest of all.
How this fits with other research
Fullana et al. (2007) seems to disagree. They found kids with Asperger’s had no emotion-perception deficit, while kids with high-functioning autism did. The new study shows a deficit in all high-trait adults. The gap closes when you look at reasoning speed, something the 2007 paper did not test.
Green et al. (2020) showed that language-based executive functions predict advanced social understanding in autism-relatives. Alex et al. extend the same idea: a specific cognitive skill—speeded reasoning—can lift emotion-recognition performance in verbally able adults.
van Timmeren et al. (2016) and Maddox et al. (2015) already proved that emotion-perception problems are real in adults with ASD. Alex et al. add the moderator piece: the deficit is real, but it can be offset.
Why it matters
If your client has strong puzzle or logic skills, use those strengths when you teach emotion recognition. Embed facial-emotion drills inside fast-paced reasoning games. You may see quicker gains than with social stories alone.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autistic people typically have difficulty recognizing other people's emotions and to process nonverbal cues in an automatic, intuitive fashion. This usually also applies to people who-regardless of an official diagnosis of autism-achieve high values in autism questionnaires. However, some autistic people do not seem to have any problems with emotion recognition. One explanation may be that these individuals are able to compensate for their lack of intuitive or automatic processing through a quick conscious and deliberate analysis of the emotional cues in faces, voices, and body movements. On these grounds, we assumed that the higher autistic people's ability to reason quickly (i.e. to make quick logical inferences), the fewer problems they should have with determining other people's emotions. In our study, we asked workers on the crowdsourcing marketplace MTurk to complete a questionnaire about their autistic traits, to perform emotion recognition tests, and to complete a test of the ability to reason under time constraints. In our sample of 217 people, we found the expected pattern. Overall, those who had higher values in the autism questionnaire scored lower in the emotion recognition tests. However, when reasoning ability was taken into account, a more nuanced picture emerged: participants with high values both on the autism questionnaire and on the reasoning test recognized emotions as well as individuals with low autistic traits. Our results suggest that fast analytic information processing may help autistic people to compensate problems in recognizing others' emotions.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2020 · doi:10.1177/1362361320937090