The understanding of the emotional meaning of facial expressions in people with autism.
Autistic children show a clear, language-independent weakness in reading facial emotions that stricter verbal controls reveal.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Schlundt et al. (1999) asked autistic kids to pick the emotion that matched a face.
They also tested kids with Down syndrome and typically developing kids.
All groups had the same verbal mental age so language skill could not sway the score.
What they found
Autistic children named far fewer emotions correctly than both other groups.
The gap stayed large even when the task blocked quick visual tricks.
This pointed to a core, specific problem with reading facial feelings.
How this fits with other research
Castelli (2005) saw no such gap, but that study did not match verbal age as tightly.
Fink et al. (2014) also found no deficit once verbal ability was removed statistically.
These contradictions show that tight verbal matching, as done by G et al., uncovers a real impairment that looser controls can hide.
Song et al. (2018) later showed autistic kids need stronger intensity to spot anger, disgust, and fear, refining the original broad deficit into a selective, intensity-linked problem.
Why it matters
When you test emotion recognition, control for verbal level or you may miss the true deficit.
Use clear, high-intensity faces when teaching feelings, then fade to milder expressions.
Track progress with matched-language probes so you know the social skill, not vocabulary, is changing.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Ten autistic individuals (mean age: 12.7 years, SD 3.8, range 5.10-16.0), 10 Down individuals (12.3 years, SD 3.0, range 7.1-16.0), and a control group of 10 children with normal development (mean age: 6.3 years, SD 1.6, range 4.0-9.4), matched for verbal mental age, were tested on a delayed-matching task and on a sorting-by-preference task. The first task required subjects to match faces on the basis of the emotion being expressed or on the basis of identity. Different from the typical simultaneous matching procedure the target picture was shortly presented (750 msec) and was not visible when the sample pictures were shown to the subject, thus reducing the possible use of perceptual, piecemeal, processing strategies based on the typical features of the emotional facial expression. In the second task, subjects were required to rate the valence of an isolated stimulus, such as facial expression of emotion or an emotional situation in which no people were represented. The aim of the second task was to compare the autistic and nonautistic children's tendency to judge pleasantness of a face using facial expression of emotion as a meaningful index. Results showed a significantly worse performance in autistic individuals than in both normal and Down subjects on both facial expression of emotion subtasks, although on the identity and emotional situation subtasks there were no significant differences between groups.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1999 · doi:10.1023/a:1025970600181